


I Come With Casual Insanity

by MyStaccatoSoul



Series: Wave, Shark, Demon in the Dark [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, But Steve is still an idiot, Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Danny is not that kind of cop, Developing Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Romance, Unresolved Sexual Tension with no Resolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 05:38:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9977963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyStaccatoSoul/pseuds/MyStaccatoSoul
Summary: It's unexpected. Danny is looking at Steve as if he's just managed to water down the dark edges of a painting. Like turpentine to oil, like sunlight and still water, everything is clearing up - and Danny? Danny can finally see the problem here.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Oh God, this is a monster of a fic I've written - and it's only one of three. This story is way back in Season One and initially it was only meant to contain a few things I planned on putting to paper. But I've loved McDanno even before I ended up watching the show and so I ended up adding more and more things until it became this juggernaut. This is the longest fic I will ever be able to write. And also...
> 
> To KR,  
> This story is long overdue. I hope this is going to make-up for one year's worth of waiting.

 

 _Come and watch me make mistakes._  
_Down the coastline I'll bury my dreams._  
_You'll dig through them with foam tipped fingers -_  
_and discover far too late_  
_how my mind's been_  
_broken by_  
_you._

 _And you'll sing me praises_  
_(sing me praises)_  
_And you'll withdraw as soon_  
_as I've held you close -_  
_because that's what you've_  
_always done._

 _So sink me under._  
_Steal my breath._  
_Take away my inhibitions._

 _Down the coastline my dreams are waking._  
_Your eyes will be my last mistake._

 

I.

 _"In high school, you were too cool_  
_to be anybody's fool_  
_And then you crashed and you burned,_  
_relax and you'll learn_  
_You're not the first and yet things can get worse."_  
_Shane Mack - Break_

It was a sign of just how poor Danny's current living standards were that he had to settle for a mix of tap water and powdered strawberry milk three days away from expiring just to get his blood sugar high enough to face the day.

It didn't help that his apartment's plumbing had been busted by a jackass two floors up when he decided to use the drained-out toilet as a cauldron for whatever god-forsaken experimental crack he had himself going (nor did it help that as a result running water in the apartment now tasted like shit and iron shavings), but it seemed to him that even as he stirred the glass of aforementioned milk with enough ferocity to put his own dinged up washing machine to shame, little pink blobs of powder still remained.

They were staring at him from the surface of his little rust-and-strawberry flavored cocktail, resolution in their invisible eyes apparent.

Danny knew he was screwed the moment he realized he saw more resolve in an inanimate object stubbornly refusing to melt into the vat that was his liquid breakfast when he compared it to his own half-hearted attempts to rebuild his life ever since stepping foot unto the island.

Feeling downright low, he pushed the glass away, leaving it to stymie in its natural undissolved state atop the counter.

Seriously, Danny is in need of a coffee fix. He needs it like the proverbial desert-crossing Arab man needs a bottle (or ten) of refrigerated water. He needs it _bad_  - hence, his willingness to experiment with the remains of Grace's aborted attempts into making homemade milkshakes (one sip of the stuff had her throwing away the pitcher down the sink). Supposedly, there was caffeine in the stuff. Apparently it had enough of it to create floating landmasses on his own cup, so there.

Coffee was one of the only things that remained familiar to him here in Hawaii. As it turned out, even halfway across the world coffee pretty much tasted the same way. He drank it black, with two spoonfuls of sugar, and he drank as often as he did of the beverage every single day - especially ever since the new case started.

HPD had been run aground not three days ago by a sudden sprawl of homicides, each occurrence appearing to be unconnected since the incidents were both miles apart from each other and with none of the victims sharing a similar COD. First ruling of course had the department pinning the entire thing as several isolated cases.

That is until further investigation reveals that all nine murders happened almost instantaneously at the same time.

Nine people dying from different causes with barely a minute to separate them from each other is not an easy thing to put a spin to, and since two of the victims were high profile (one being an international business man, the other a budding star in a genre of music Danny was pretty sure no one who spoke English regularly would ever be able to pronounce), putting up a smokescreen for the entire matter was an impossibility.

Nevertheless, HPD persevered. By the end of Day One it became obvious though to everybody involved that they needed help - as in capital H.E.L.P.

And as always, Detective Danny Williams got the short end of the stick from all of it.

Danny breathes through an extended sigh. In three days he had only been inside this apartment a grand total of once. The past few days had been spent subsisting on a ration of coffee from the precinct (terrible stuff), stale energy bars (you know something's wrong when you're eating chocolate out of necessity), and a couple or two of smokes (for those times when you just won't stop vibrating).

If he left now without chugging down that pink vat of death Danny was sure he was going to collapse the next time he sat down to sketch yet another one of their vics. So swallowing his anxiety (and pride as well for good measure), Danny takes hold of the viscous liquid crap and downs it in one gulp.

It tastes like rain, woe, misery, rust, and codeine stuffed with strawberries.

In short, it tasted like everyday life.

* * * * *

Steve assessed the train wreck of a crime scene before him calmly - or at least, as calmly as one could possibly expect to assess something with only two hours of sleep and a couple of intermittent power naps to keep on running.

This case came at the worst time for him. With half a dozen leads on Wo Fat finally surfacing on the island, Steve couldn't afford losing what he estimated to be at least a week and a half of slugging through crime scene photos and witness testimonies on a case that - with all due respect - he couldn't give less of a shit about.

Chin and Kono understood why he was so wound up about finishing the case, but unlike the newcomer Jenna, they didn't have the same level of empathy he had for finally closing the book on this multiple homicide.

And to add insult to injury, since there were so many deaths to scrutinize, Five-0 had been forced to split up to address each and every one of the murders. Steve was at least lucky enough that he didn't manage to get himself assigned to one of the more controversial deaths of the day.

He had gotten off with a local - male, mid-thirties, estranged from family - and judging by the number of beer bottles stashed underneath his sink - a perpetual drunk. That made for fewer people to pester him on the crime scene and an easier time on the phone with his relatives.

Not that it mattered though. Steve was bone-deep tired.

He was supposed to last longer than this. He had gone on far more taxing training regimens and missions compared to this back in the Navy.

But of course, none of them were ever really _personal_. Orders are common place when you're a SEAL - but serving with a vendetta is a sure-fire way to get yourself killed no matter where you are in the U.S. army.

The thought of spending time away from what he was supposed to be digging his nose in was burdening - like just being here somehow put an extra ton or two on his shoulders.

Steve needs to sit down before he finds himself lying on the floor, flat on his back, and in a goddamn coma.

And just as he does, that's when his phone rings.

Steve takes a second to stare at the image flashing on the screen of his cellular. When his eyes finally focus on the caller, the multitude of pixels swimming before him settles on Chin's face.

Steve blinks, willing away the exhaustion before finally answering the phone.

"McGarett, speak," was his terse reply.

"Everything okay on your end, bruh?" Chin asks, voice reluctant.

"Yeah, 'm alright. Found nothing noteworthy here - vic died from gradual intake of a cyanide laced bottle of beer. I'm actually surprised that he never noticed something was off with the taste of his Longboard cause it looks like he drained the entire bottle. Anyway, 'm fine, why do you ask?"

"Well, kudos to your vic's stupidity but right now I'm more concerned about you, Steve. Your voice sounds like gravel being crushed underneath the tires of someone's car."

Steve winces. He was aware his voice was a little gravelly - but for it to actually come across as such through a phone call? Wow, he must sound really bad.

"I would love some sleep right now Chin, but I'd like to wrap up whatever this is before the week's over so I can start chasing down that bastard Wo Fat in earnest."

Steve can practically hear the disapproval in Chin's voice despite his toneless assent, and so to stop himself from feeling guilty for stepping on his teammate's concerns Steve instead asks about Chin's own findings from his side of the island.

Right away he knows that he shouldn't have asked. Chin takes too long to reply, but when he finally does his voice is calm and devoid of inflection. It would have been impossible to read, only that Steve knows Chin too well not to get a clue.

Chin only sounds like this when he's caught in a dead end.

"Nothing. Too much blood, too much gunpowder residue, and not enough bullet holes in the body or the scene to justify either of the two. I feel like a kid poking at puddles out in the rain - everything's gone muddy."

"Max figure out anything yet?" Steve asks, half-hoping that their boy-geek wonder of a cadaver specialist was at least successful on his front.

Chin's sigh is answer enough. "Too many bodies to process. I think this is the first time Max has ever been overwhelmed ever since the establishment of Five-0."

"No luck, huh?" Steve says, a weary smile on his lips as he carefully massages his throbbing temples.

"No luck at all." Chin says in agreement. "Get some sleep, Steve. Can't have the head of Hawaii's premier task force running on second gear - everybody else would have to compensate then."

"Ha. Not funny, Chin. I ain't no superman."

"Well, superman or not, I'm telling you to power down, especially since I've just caught word that you're about to meet up with HPD's most disagreeable detective on the job."

This gets a raised eyebrow from Steve. For the first time since this clusterfuck landed on his lap, he's actually heard something vaguely interesting - and not just another god awful twist in his efforts to hunt down his father's murderer. He sits up on his chair (scratch that - on the countertop), looks out the window as if he could spot this detective coming despite the fact he's never met up with any of HPD's previous detectives and asks,

"Oh. Who is he?"

There's a smile lurking in Chin's reply. "A haole. I pulled up his file from the mobile. He's like your average vacationer - except UNLIKE your average vacationer; he's loud, he's brash, he's uncooperative, and he sure as hell does not know anything about island etiquette."

The description alone sends tingles of dislike up and down Steve's spine. He's already frowning even before Chin's halfway through his description of the detective.

"Perfect. Another headache's coming my way."

Chin lets out a chuckle from the other side of the line. "Keep me posted Steve. And do tell me what happens when the two of you eventually meet."

* * * * *

And meet they do.

Steve's nodding off listening to one of the officers in charge drone on and on about what his team has managed to uncover from the scene and he can't be bothered to tell the man to shut up - that they already know everything he's droning on about - since his voice is just the perfect white noise to finally lull him to sleep.

That is until an ungodly racket sends him rocketing to consciousness within the span of a millisecond.

People are shouting and screaming outside. Even Mister-I-sound-like-a-sonograph has noticed and has decided to grace them all with his silence before checking said racket from the door.

From here Steve can see the man's expression change from surprise to anger and then taper down to passive displeasure. It's incredible to watch just how much emotion whoever is making this noise outside is bringing out of every single HPD officer in the vicinity. Like whoever this stranger is has managed to embody the bane of the entire police force. Imagine, just popping out of thin air has them all with hackles raised.

David Blaine's Samoan counterpart says something untowards in pidgin and just like that the man from outside shuts him down completely with a veritable torrent of sound before he could get more than four words out.

Steve is impressed by this level of noise. This person talking - with a Jersey accent no less - sounds like he's speaking with the aid of a megaphone. Steve briefly wonders just how huge this man must be if even he, despite his considerable height, can't raise pandemonium with just the sound of his voice.

(Seriously it's like a flock of seagulls are squawking in harmony five inches from his ear.)

So when he goes outside and spots not a bear but an overly-gelled Hobbit screaming away at the faces of a couple of disconcerted looking men in uniform, Steve feels like doing an actual honest-to-God double-take.

"I was sent here! Here you two chuckle heads - the Chief himself made the call! It was his say so, he gave me his word, he radioed it in, meaning green lights for go, _go_ , GO! Do you not understand what I'm saying? I have a right to be here!"

"So loud." The man earlier remarks from Steve's side. "That one never seems to shut up - and he talks like he can't hear himself talking. Maddening."

Normally he'd agree to the man's opinions, but seeing as he was the exact opposite of the man he found to be maddening Steve thought it laughable of him to be making observations like that.

He's about to head back to the interior, try and stave off the inevitable meeting between the two of them for just a little bit longer when the blonde man from outside locks eyes with him and starts screaming.

"Hey you! Prince Charming, over here! You Five-0, right? Tell these people to let me in! I'm tryna do my job here same as everyone else!"

Steve clenches his jaw, considering his chances. He's not in the best of moods to be interacting with loud-mouthed, hot-headed, malihini cops who don't seem to comprehend the meaning of complete jurisdiction, but before he can think of a game plan the man is already shouldering past the uniforms with a bluster to his step that only serves to drive more fuel to the pyroclastic material coursing through Steve's veins. His temples are throbbing like a drum solo from an Aerosmith song and really, this won't end well.

No fucking way that it will.

"Detective Daniel Williams, I presume." Steve says, lips thinning as the man approaches him. Up close he can see just how unshaven the man is. Lines crinkle on either side of his eyes as he squints up, and Steve is willing to bet 10 bucks right now that the detective before him is only starting to realize just how substantial the difference between their heights are now that they're basically overlapping into each other's personal space.

But the man doesn't seem bothered - not even the slightest - that the two of them are standing so close to each other as to be mistaken for something else. His complete ignorance on the matter just makes Steve hate him more.

The man looks him up and down before snorting.

Steve crosses his arms against his chest and opens his eyes wide, trying his damnedest to menace the man into a more respectful state of mind.

"Excuse me?" He asks. "Was that supposed to mean something?"

The man - Daniel - looks up at him with disbelief. "Yes. Yes, it meant something. Unfortunately for you, the manner in which I express myself to other people does not come with subtitles, so if you don't understand what that snort meant then sad for you because I'm not about to stand here and explain it to you for your benefit. Now let me through so I can start doing my thing."

Steve grits his teeth - he gnashes them together like dental fillings are an altogether foreign concept to him. As the detective moves to slip through the gap between him and the officer on other side of the door, Steve extends an arm over the space, barring the blonde man from entering.

Steve tries again with the whole menacing thing. Either he's not being menacing enough, or the man before him was somehow born with the inability to read visual cues because _he just won't take the hint_.

"I have jurisdiction here, Detective." He says the last word with barely repressed hostility. "And I don't appreciate people like you trying to force your way into my crime scene. Besides, the rest of your colleagues have already helped me finish scoping the site out so you don't have anything else to do here. Have a nice day, Detective Williams."

Daniel looks at him once again. This time, Steve somehow sees through all the swagger emanating from him and into the man lying beneath the facade. He doesn't know how he managed to see through the cracks of his armor, but what he sees inside startles him. William's eyes are the deep blue of the sea, so dark and so far into the void that it feels like his pupils are drowning in their very own ocean. Steve forgets to breath, himself drowning in the waters of Danny William's unflinching gaze.

Steve sees his composure break a full second before the hook comes swinging into his vision. He's not fast enough to dodge it and the blow snags him right at the side of his head, sending incandecent sparks of light not unlike that of a shattering fluorescent bulb into the darkness of his closed eyelids.

He lands firmly on his ass against the floor. He's never taken a tumble like this back when he was still serving in the Navy - back when bar-room fights were still a thing Steve had to constantly watch out for. And it _hurts_.

It hurts like fucking hell. That is one mean left hook.

Sprawling on the ground, he opens his eyes to see the Detective glaring at him still from the landing outside the door. There's no mocking in his features, nor a shred of glory, pleasure, or satisfaction from having to hit Steve. He's just... angry.

And tired. Even more so than him, Steve realizes.

He walks past the head of Five-0, still on his ass against the polished floorboards, and as he does he hears him mutter four words.

A proclamation.

"I don't like you." He says simply.

* * * * *

Danny smells like strawberries and burnt sugar. The former's understandable, but the latter is just plain weird. Is he wearing the same shirt from four days ago when he had to fry bagels for dinner? Dammit, he's lost track of clean clothing.

He scopes out the house and braces himself against the smell that assails him when he opens the door to the living room.

Yup. Bitter almonds. Danny can't stop himself from taking two steps back from the entrance to the living room reflexively. The smell is so strong he's partly grateful for the fact that right now he smells like a Crispy Creme donut. They somehow cancel each other out. He expected as much when he scented the smell from that bastard at the door, but this?

This is just too much.

He claps his hands together and ruminates on the extremely foul hand dealt to him. I mean, sure, Danny expected that one of the members of the Governor's "sparkling" task force was bound to show up at the crime scenes now decorating the main isle, but for God's sake weren't there nine murders? And four new ones today?

And weren't there only three members on that damn squad?

So how'd he manage to not only get one of them on his own assignment, but the one who shows up also has to be the most detestable one of the three?

Danny's no idiot. Though he's only a Detective on paper, at least HPD had the decency to give him an actual badge and a working passcode. He ferreted out information on the three from Meka's computer (because Meka's the only one in the precinct who seems able to put up with Danny's presence, Danny's moods, Danny's rantings and, well, just plain Danny in general), although unsurprisingly what he ends up pulling out has been wiped away of confidential info. Still, he may be nothing more than a glorified police consultant here in Hawaii, but his skills haven't dulled (that much).

He managed to circumvent some of the whitewashing done on their files and in doing so finds himself with a rudimentary psychiatric evaluation on all three. Under normal circumstances he'd be hard-pressed to even get Meka's computer running - that's why Danny's glad his only friend in the HPD has taken his marital advice and has taken to leaving more often to resolve some issues with Amy because 1.) that gives him less time playing therapist to the woman on his off-days, and 2.) he finally gets a fucking desk to himself in the precinct.

Now, if only the place didn't serve craptacular coffee, all would be right in the world.

Chin Ho Kelly and Kono Kalakua seem manageable enough, but Lt. Commander Steven John McGarett trips his alarm bells the moment he reads the problematic file on display. Whoever conducted the evaluation must've been sharing the same feeling of anxiety and disquiet Danny himself felt when he first read through the entire thing.

Words jump out at him from the screen. The words RECKLESS, TEMPERAMENTAL, and INTENSE are used more than he could count in either of his hands, and considering how the file before him is supposedly a condensation of the original, Danny has no choice but to conclude that the SEAL sharing the same breathing space as him is insane.

In fact, insane is an understatement - Steven John McGarett is the basketcase of all basketcases.

He turns to the man still glaring at him from the floor and says, "When do you plan on getting up, Commander?"

Steve pushes himself up from the floor.

"Shut up." He gets out before passing Danny and closing the door back to the living room behind him. He looks to him and says, "You know - you should really work harder on keeping your temper in check. People like you get other people killed out on the field."

Danny's smile is blindingly insincere. "Oh, I'm sorry, did you say something? Well, Commander, see, although you may not appreciate me waltzing in to your investigation, I do not appreciate being told just that in your special little passive-aggressive way of telling people to fuck off. You want me off the site, just tell me."

"Passive-aggress-" Steve splutters, "I was being polite! You're the one who started throwing fists here! Let me tell you - it is NOT my fault that you can't take being told by someone of higher authority than you that you cannot fucking be here on this crime scene."

Danny's hands rise instinctively, fingers clutching and clawing at empty space as if he's dying to do the same thing to Steve's skin.

"If that's the case, then why are those black-and-blues here, huh? Why are they helping you out? Are they also part of your oh-so-precious Five-0? Is it just me or am I the only one in _all of HPD_  not allowed to help out in an investigation? Is this how you treat every mainlander here in this god-forsaken island who has the good will to try and-"

"Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah - this has nothing to do about you being an outsider."

"Oh yeah? Tell that to them." And with that, he slips past Steve again and opens the door to the living room.

It's a good thing Danny has a face mask on his person because there's no way he's going to be able to do his sketches with these wretched smell lingering in the room. He tries to shut the door behind him - try and get himself a little bit of privacy - when Steve bangs a shoulder against the frame clearly not intending to give him even just a second of peace and quiet.

"You know you have issues, right?" He growls.

Danny doesn't even turn around to address him. He's too busy extricating a sketch pad from the crumpled interior of his bag and looking for unbroken pencils Grace might have neglected to filch.

"Proud of them." Danny says.

Steve looks at him for a beat - long enough to still Danny's ministrations - until he breaths a quiet sigh and props himself against the doorframe in resignation. There's still fire in his eyes and his posture just about screams of intoleration, but at least he's keeping his distance from Danny.

And for that he's grateful.

Since the dead guy's probably not going to comment on Danny's use of the furniture, he drags one of the chairs sequestered to the sides of the room and brings it around to the table. There he cracks open his pad and begins assembling his tools. The vic is upright on the couch, skin still warm and vibrant with colour.

Not enough time for necrosis to settle.

Danny's eyes flicker to the man's face and takes a snapshot of what he sees - including an arm from his pissed off escort jutting out from the background. He tucks away the memory of what he sees into the drawers of his mind and starts in on the portrait, hands automatically flowing without effort into a rhythm one can only associate with years and years of practice.

Steve watches all this with grudging fascination. Not only did he expect to be rid of the blonde man at right about this time, he also didn't expect to see him rearranging the crime scene all so he could take the time to draw the cadaver before him.

The side of his face is still throbbing from the blow, but Steve would be damned if he admitted to that fact while the man responsible for both his present and future headache remained in the area. He inches forward, just a little, reluctant as he is to inhale more of the acrid scent filling the room.

Danny is unmistakably sketching the cadaver in great detail. Although Steve's impressed by his skill, he honestly doesn't understand the reason for his efforts.

"Look," he starts, "I know the two of us got off at the wrong start. I'd be happy to accomodate you into this investigation and everything else, but I did mean it when I said earlier that there is absolutely nothing else in here left to poke our noses in. So if you could just stop - doodling or whatever it is you're doing - I'd be perfectly happy to escort you back home to where I can properly inform you about the details of this case."

"Man oh man." Danny gets out.

"What?" Steve says, his tone cracking. Not for the second time does Steve get the feeling that the detective is purposely doing all this to try and test his patience.

"Well, babe - I'm gonna call you babe, okay? - that's two times in less than one minute you just told me that you'd be perfectly happy to do something for me if I just up and leave right now. What that says right there is that you, you my dear implacable friend, will say anything, do anything, to get me out of your hair right now. Your persuasion sucks ass, babe, and for the record don't go thinking that I don't know that 'escorting me back home to properly inform me about the details of the case' doesn't translate to dumping me back into my hovel with only a police report to extrapolate information from. Don't you fucking lie to me man."

"Fine." Steve says, "Okay. No lying, I get that."

He uncrosses his arms from his chest and straightens to display his full-height. "I fucking want you out of here Williams right now."

Steve expects the detective to rage - to go berserk and start spouting off again as soon as he's finished ordering him out - but instead Daniel Williams collects his stuff, crams it back to his too-small bag, shoots one last look of blue-eyed fire at Steve, and finally bustles past him, taking care to "accidentally" bump one broad, muscular shoulder against his side. He rams him hard enough to rock his posture, and Steve can't help but make a noise of complete and utter frustration from deep down his throat as the detective shoves past him - looking as unruffled and as chipper coming in as he looked coming out.

"No problem. I didn't think I could stand to look at you for another second longer anyway." He calls out as he makes his exit.

As soon as he's gone, Steve relaxes. He's not even aware of the tension pulling at every muscle, every organ, deep inside his body like a bowstring being drawn to its very limits until Steve sees the man throw his bag unceremoniously through the backseat of his Honda Civic. His body lightens up, the pressure building in him breaking apart in disjointed fragments as he lets it all out in one broken breathe.

The officer lecturing him earlier looks like he completely sympathizes with his plight, and maybe that right there, unsolicited pity from other people, is reason enough for Steve to start considering taking a break.

If he's going to start running into that human hurricane at a daily basis, he might as well compensate for a few well deserved hours of sleep. He takes out his phone, murmurs a few farewells to the remaining policemen still on site, walks the few steps to his Mercury and dials Chin's number purely out of reflex. He's too out of it to realize that he could have done the very same thing from just pressing speed-dial #6, but he's tired.

Tired enough to know that he's starting to short-circuit.

This time, Steve can only manage a few words as soon as he hears Chin's friendly voice from the other side of the line.

Once again, he asks, "You okay, bruh?"

Steve leans his head against the steering wheel of the car. "I just met the end of my days, Chin."

Chin laughs, the bastard. "Yeah? So you met Williams I take it? What's he like?"

Steve closes his eyes. Unexpected, the memory of drowning in his baby blues hits him like a rogue tide. He doesn't understand why everything inside him just clenches right at that moment.

"He's a bigger headache than I thought." He tells Chin. Like always, his father's partner doesn't ask him for more than that, which Steve is very grateful for. After a few more questions, all of which Steve answers with one-worded replies, Chin gives him the same advice from before. Steve consents with a nod, too tired to say anything else.

 

II.

 _"Baby we can make it_  
_Pull me off the pavement_  
_Bring me back to basics_  
_Ever since I left you_  
_You took me a part of me I can't replace it."_  
_Stephen - Remembering Myself_

"Hey man, you okay?"

Danny looks up from his nearly three-hour long project now neatly laid out before him on the table.

Meka's at the door, his silhouette just barely visible through the screen and against the backdrop of Hawaii's darkening horizons. Danny can smell coffee even all the way from his seat, and although he knows that it's the same wretched liquid crap that the denizens of HPD seem to favour so much, by this point Danny is willing to accept any form of stimulant offered to him because he's already been tap dancing all over the line seperating sleep and consciousness for the better part of the afternoon, and although he hasn't been outright snoring on the tabletop, he somehow can't seem to pinpoint when exactly did his drool start making puddles beside his work.

He surreptitiously wipes away the pool of drool with a nearby crumpled sheet of paper before ushering in the only civil man he knows from the force.

"No." Danny says as he picks up from where he left off on his work. He's got a perfect, hand-drawn reproduction of a crime scene from one of the initial murders staring at him from his desk. Being careful not to smudge the graphite with his rather large fingers, he pushes the piece aside to start on yet another photo of the same crime scene from a different angle.

"I'm tired, I can't see straight, and the Copacabana song has been on repeat in my head since the sun went down - which, by the way, is ridiculous since I don't even know half the words to that song."

Meka laughs. Meka's voice can normally be characterized as cool, mellow, and smoky as hell. He sounds like someone you'd normally expect to make a living on a bar or a riverboat, the kind of people who sings jazz songs on a nightly basis. It's just that sexy.

Except Danny's receptors are fried. Even Meka's voice manages to grate on him the way a cheese grater makes sushi fillings out of someone's back. And oh holy shit, even his metaphors are going whack on him.

"That doesn't sound right Danny. How can you keep hearing something in your head when you don't even know the entire words to the song?"

"Simple. Barry just goes 'huh huh hmm hmmm huh huh hmmm' on the parts I can't remember, and everything else sounds normal. Is that coffee by the way?"

"Yeah."

"I think I need it."

Danny takes one of the cups from Meka's hands and downs it in one scalding gulp. Danny doesn't even flinch from the heat - which is sign number one that Danny really, _really_  needs to get some rest.

"Danny?" Meka ventures.

"Yeah?" Danny looks up from his drawing but his hand is still on auto-pilot.

Meka rubs his hands together knowing full well that his suggestion's going to earn him one of Danny's infamous rants.

"Shouldn't you be going to sleep right now? Not to burst your bubble or anything bruh, but I don't think HPD or Five-0 is going to be in need of your sketches. See... they have these things called cameras, and they're, well, infinitely more efficient than your pictures."

Danny stops. Meka's heart skips a beat.

"You actually think," one hand goes up, "that all these drawing's I've been sketching," there goes the other one, "that _ALL_ these drawings I've made - I made for the benefit of Honululu's 'supposed' finest and that goddamned task force?"

"No, I didn't mean-"

"Oh, so, what? Were you just - I don't know - telling me to stop working because what I'm doing is never going to amount to anything?" Says Danny with faux calm.

"Danny, bruh, that wasn't what I meant when I said-"

" _Fuck that!_ " Danny shouts, his voice ripping through his vocal chords like a jet engine. It should be blowing back the furniture, it should be popping Meka's eardrums; Danny's voice should be making itself acquainted to the farmers of Saskatchewan and to the sorry inhabitants of the North Pole right about now. But instead he's screaming at his only friend from the department, his voice searing holes through the peaceful Hawaiian night sky. Somewhere out there, the officers of HPD - along with Steve and his lackeys - should be dropping dead from unexplainable heart attacks.

That's how loud Danny's voice is.

"I don't care if you think I'm wasting my time. HPD might not think I'm an asset but I am still a recognized detective, whatever they might think! I'm doing these things for my own sake - for my own investigation! So don't tell me I'm wasting my time or else I'm going to get out of this chair and tear you a n-"

"Okay! Okay! Geez, hehena - you made your point." Meka says, back pressed against the chair, as far away from Danny's rage as possible. Seeing Meka terrified, Danny relents. He eases back down, cradling his forehead with his hands, a pencil still sticking out from between his grey-stained fingers. Danny can feel himself shaking from the left-over rage and exhaustion - the kind that can only be a product of going more than three days without reasonable sleep.

He's pushing himself too hard, Danny knows it himself, but still it's no reason for him to blow up on his friend's face.

Danny puts down his hands, unable to look at Meka for a second. He's trembling so hard from the whiplash of his pent up emotions that he has to take a few seconds to string words into comprehensible sentence.

"Look - I apologize. I didn't mean to say all that - stuff."

Meka takes a beat - probably to compose himself. A fragile smile appears on his lips, more for the sake of Danny's sanity than his before he draws himself back in to Danny's space.

He grips one of Danny's shoulders, willing some consolation into him before finally speaking.

"I know, Danny. Don't concern yourself with it. I knew even before I said all those things you were gonna blow up. I just - didn't want to see you go through all that hard work just for someone else to finish the job. I hate seeing anybody left out to hang and dry. It's painful to watch."

Danny presses a lid on his freakout, but it's only temporary. He knows he's going to start shaking again when Meka leaves, but for now he's more concerned with not repeating the same incident. He smiles in answer to Meka's response, happy that Meka at least has the sincerity to tell him his own concerns for Danny's well-being. Aside from Grace, Meka seems to be the only person on this island who seems to care even a little bit for him.

Which just makes Danny feel guiltier and guiltier.

Danny shakes his head. "I know I'm useless here, Meka. I just want to feel like I'm doing something - every second I spend here not being the cop that I was makes me feel like I'm drowning in the dregs of some loser's beer."

Meka chuckles. "You should count yourself lucky then."

Danny quirks an eyebrow. "Why?"

Meka presses their foreheads closer - close enough that Danny can feel the pounding of Meka's pulse from his temples. Their breaths mingle, one sour from days of neglect, the other bitter from days of taking in nothing more than coffee.

Meka raises a cup between them. Danny eyes it like there's something supposed to be there.

"'Because, bradda, beer of any kind is still a better fare than HPD's shit-tasting coffee." Meka says.

The joke doesn't even make sense but maybe Danny's too tired and Meka too wired because the two of them end up laughing so hard they're spilling everything on the tabletop. Danny's got the drawings pressed to his chest in an instant but he's laughing so hard he nearly pitches to the floor, breathless. Meka helps steady him, himself shaking from the humor. His back against the cold tiles, Danny eventually concedes that, yes, he is in fact in need of some sleep and so allows Meka to drag his sorry ass to his pull-out couch.

Despite everything, Danny's glad he's got Meka. He can see the day the two of them no longer need each other fast approaching, but for now he's happy. For now, Meka's here.

Danny's friend leaves ten minutes later. The detective is out cold even before the man can take a step outside.

* * * * *

It's a testament to just how long he's been working his ass off that when Danny wakes up, he has to check the clock he has somehow stashed beneath his pillow if it's been broken by his lying around.

He went to bed - couch, whatever - at approximately 10:27 that evening. When he next wakes up, the clock says it's around 6:30 but when he looks out, instead of a rising sun he sees one that's on its way to disappearing beneath the waves.

He's so surprised he ends up lobbing the useless thing towards the far side of the room where surprise, surprise, the thing dismantles itself upon impact with an ungodly crack.

Great. Now he's down a clock. Seriously, did that mean he slept through the alarm?

He launches himself through the door, backs up when he realizes he can't go snooping around the rest of Hawaii wearing the same burnt-sugar smelling, drool-stained shirt from yesterday, rushes back towards the bathroom to attend to his grumbling facilities before getting out 20 minutes later with his hair wet, ungelled, and looking like an undiscovered variant of the hedgehog family.

He's got a new shirt and tie tucked underneath his armpits but decides on impulse to put them on in the first gas station privy he sees on the drive to where he's going. His old clothes wind up being shoved into the dashboard.

And speaking of where he's going, Danny has no idea where exactly he's supposed to head towards. By now they should've closed up the crime scenes and documented everything of import so even if he does drive towards one of those places, every piece of evidence that could be collected would be now safely tucked away in the clutches of the department.

Danny stops short on the way to his car.

What now?

Danny's declaration from yesterday evening - about working on this case on his own - now seems utterly laughable. How's he going to investigate this all on his own? His drawings may be perfect replicas of crime scene photos but it's not like he's got every single one of them. Hell, the last few ones he even got to make sketches from were photos that Meka had to get away from the evidence drawer. Danny shouldn't expect help from that front anytime soon.

He's all Meka'd out.

Not to mention that he's going on this job without any resources and without any expectations of getting paid at the very end. Unless Danny figures out how to get himself a very controversial arrest and show up on the paper, Danny isn't sure he's ever going to get HPD to recognize him fully enough to expect payment.

So that only leaves two possible choices for him. Either he offers his official services to HPD (where he knows they're just going to laugh him out of the precinct without even bothering to hear him out), or go and make a fool of himself at Five-0 headquarters in the hopes that they're going to take him in to their fold.

No, Danny stops himself right there. Five-0, Williams? Really?

As much as he despises HPD, Danny can't ignore the fact that beneath every sparkling accomplishment that shows up on the paper about Governor Jameson's special task force, there is always a horrifying story right there left untold.

He's read the police reports. He's read through witness testimonies, stories of perps screaming out complaints about unethical practices that makes the prospect of full immunity and means look like an unmitigated nightmare to whoever's on the opposing end.

Danny's got no sympathy for perps, alright? But ever since he learned of Five-0's exploits he's started developing a conscience for the undocumented half of Law and Order.

That's not even mentioning that whenever there's a bust that involves Five-0 spearheading the entire matter, casualties seem to rise like the frickin' red tide. Five-0 scares Danny.

And with that in mind, he's not about to offer anything to that squad of hellions ever.

Too bad the universe seems out to screw him completely out of his mind.

Danny steels his resolve, telling himself that what really matters right now is that they solve whatever it is that's happening here on this goddamn slice of paradise. He's just about finished convincing himself that the correct course of action here is to go and ask HPD one more time to let him in to the investigation formally when his phone suddenly rings.

He takes it out of his pocket as he sidles up to the driver's seat of his car.

It's an unknown number.

Odd, Danny thinks to himself, is there someone else on this island who can actually be bothered to call him aside from his ex-wife, his daughter, and Meka?

Shrugging to himself, he pulls up the phone to his ear, clinches it to the side of his face with a shoulder as he ducks down inside to finally start the ignition when he presses the answer button and says-

"Daniel Williams. This is Lt. Commander Steven J. McGarett. Meet me at Wailana Coffee House half an hour from now. Place's at Waikiki. And by the way, don't be late - I have something important to talk to you about."

Scratch that. He doesn't get to say anything. Just as the SEAL finishes spouting off his spiel, Danny opens his mouth to start his first long-winded rant of the day when he's promptly made to shut up by the sound of Lt. Commander Steven J. McGarett disconnecting from the other end. He brings back the phone before him, looks at it with complete outrage and disbelief and considers for a brief moment whether or not he should let his phone suffer the same fate as his alarm clock.

Thankfully, the image of Grace pops back up on the screen, stilling Danny's motions just as he's about to throw it out of the driver's seat window curveball-style.

 _Breathe_ , Danny thinks, _just breathe_. Maybe the man's trying to... what? Broker a trade? For information?

Yeah, that must be it. Danny thinks to himself. Maybe the man just needs a little help from him. Who knows? Maybe his little stunt from back then even made an impression on him. Just this once, Danny's going to offer help - if it means he's going to get something out of this in return.

With that thought on mind, Danny pushes down on all his doubts and inhibitions. He's pulling up the GPS and a mobile map of Honululu to the aforementioned area as soon as he gets the car going.

* * * * *

 

ONE HOUR EARLIER

"Unbelievable!" Steve snaps, pounding on the table's interface hard enough to confuse the computer's programming. Open windows start closing, unrelated files start turning up everywhere, and another second later - Steve has no idea how he did it exactly - but an emulator's popped up and suddenly Steve is looking at a paused game of PacMan. He's inwardly marveling how someone could possibly achieve the score blinking before his eyes because that is just not humanly possible.

Momentarily diverted, he looks up in time to see Kono flash him the peace sign along with a very inscrutable and very, very mischievous smile.

Steve decides to make a mental note of talking to Kono later about her and her penchant for installing games on the workplace computer because seriously, the thing's response time is starting to lag somewhere behind the International Date Line - and he is not about to go through the experience of having this computer repaired once again just because Kono has decided the thing is slowing down too much to her liking and has thought up the solution that kicking at the CPU with her stiletto boots just might make the thing go faster.

Then again, the first time the computer ended up being broken it was his fault - the computer was beginning to slow to a crawl, but instead of kicking at the CPU, Steve actually managed to shove his entire leg through the damn thing. He decides not to bring it up right at that instant.

"So you're saying that despite our witness drawing a bead on one of our killers the entire time she spent lurking underneath the coffee table, she still can't make up an accurate description of the man?"

"Chill, boss." Kono says, pulling back the emulator before once again putting up the windows opened earlier with nothing more than a few tap of her fingers. "People forget this stuff. If a victim is sufficiently traumatized, details slip through."

"I'm aware of that," Steve says with his patient voice (judging by the look on Chin, Kono, and Jenna's faces though, Steve's expression is far from coming across as such), "the thing that I can't wrap my head around here though is that this witness has had an unobstructed visual of that man for two hours straight. Even if you somehow forget the face in all that time, you should at least register what he sounded like or even what his damn clothes were. Yet no, two hours of staring at our killer's face and all she can tell us is that he looked like 'a man.'"

Kono looks at him pityingly. Chin is his usual unreadable self. Jenna is looking at the three of them with a cup of shaved ice in her hands, looking for all the world like somebody having the time of her life.

Steve paces for a minute, trying hard to think of a solution where he could possibly jog the girl's memory without giving her a heart attack. Nothing's coming up though except for pages upon pages of classified interrogation tactics. Without any other ideas Steve is just about to propose a scenario where he thinks he can introduce just the right amount of mental stress to their witness - get her to start recalling important stuff when one look from the cousins has him deflating like a punctured balloon.

"What?" He raises both arms defensively.

Kono shakes her head. "I think I got this one covered boss. I think I know just the right guy to help our girl here with her memory problems."

And so Kono pulls out that _one file_.

"This man is-"

"No." Steve says sharply. Although he's unaware of it, Steve's posture has once again fallen into the same position it had taken from his last conversation with Detective Williams. It's as if one meeting alone had ingrained into Steve the awareness that for all his physical advantages over the smaller man, his body still found Daniel Williams a sufficient threat to his well-being.

How exactly his body arrived at that conclusion, Steve will never know.

"What do you mean 'no'? Do you know this guy, boss?"

Steve rubs at his eyes with calloused fingers. "Yes. I met him at the crime scene of the cyanide killing. He's... very hard to deal with."

A major understatement, coming from his part. Steve doesn't bother correcting the impression he's imparting to his colleagues - even if he tries to better explain about Danny and how exactly he's very hard to get along with, there's not a doubt in his mind that whatever he says is still going to fall short of the mark by a very considerable distance.

"Well," Jenna snorts with the straw in her mouth, "no offense meant here but if it's you, Commander, I have no doubt that the two of you would find it very difficult to talk to each other. Maybe you should let me or Kono or Chin talk to him in-"

Steve raises a hand, cutting her off. "This isn't about that, okay? Can we all back up for a second, people? This guy, this, this detective - I don't see how he's going to be a benefit for us in this case. Granted, yes, the two of us don't get along-"

"At all." Chin adds in an undertone.

Steve glares at him from the corner of his eye but nevertheless forges on as if he didn't hear the interruption.

"-and yes, maybe he's not going to be that way for the rest of us, but still, even if we don't take in to account his personality, what exactly does he have that's going to help us solve this case?"

As if he's being dense on purpose, Kono throws him a look that Steve knows has been especially tailored just for him.

Steve knows that some people's looks come with their own complete sentences. Chin's impassive expression of the "I'm talking to an idiot" persuasion comes to mind readily, as well as Kamekona's "I got you brudah!" face with matching mile-wide smile - the one that always precedes him giving away an XL shirt, an XL bowl of shaved ice, an XL platter of shrimp-flavored tofu, and on one memorable occasion, a concussive grenade Steve had to smuggle through the confines of HQ before he could wrap it in duct tape and place it safely inside his glove compartment. (Thankfully not as big as the rest.)

Well, Kono's face isn't like any of those at all. Kono's face doesn't speak to him of anything. Instead, Kono's face comes with the image of her standing over Steve with a bloody rolling pin in hand.

"Try reading his file, Steve." Kono flicks her fingers over the interface. Danny's face lights up one entire side of the table.

"You've obviously read the file Kono, so why don't you just give me a summary?"

Kono transitions from bloody-rolling-pin-face to a bright and insincere smile at an instant. "Can't. Too tired. You're not about to let a lady hurt her eyes by reading teensy print now would you, boss?"

Steve rolls his eyes at her but does what he's told. He's not used to banter like this or to having his suggestions ignored or roundly flouted - Navy orientation does that to you - but here he let's it fly. After all, everyone in this room has the credentials to be part of Jameson's task force - and qualifying as such calls for certain quirks to be excused.

He does have to go over the terms of their employment though first thing after this case is over because it's rapidly becoming apparent to him that somewhere along the months they had spent working with each other, there's been a considerable shift in power without Steve's knowing.

Five minutes into reviewing the extensive file pulled out before him and Steve is pretty much convinced. Detective Daniel "Danny" Williams' record is spotless, with countless letters of recommendation from Newark PD decorating his transcript of records. Steve suspects that had this man not decided on impulse to leave for Hawaii, he would have been promoted to a better position in the next few years or so.

The preliminary records alone are astounding enough on their own right, but Steve also sees that the man spent two years studying offender profiling even before making it as a detective.

Steve can't help but re-evaluate his opinions of the man.

He skims through more details, more accomplishments, things that Steve deems as redundant from what he's already seen of the man's record - there's even a mention of him having outstanding visual memory in there, whatever that's supposed to mean - until a side note right at the very middle of the document stops him short.

Steve blinks at what he sees, suddenly unsure.

It's a description of Danny, headed by a single word.

VOLATILE, the print reads.

He's going over passages from updated reports courtesy of HPD, and despite the congratulatory feel of Danny's file from the preceding pages, the ones he's reading into now are tinged with just the right amount of hostility to trip something deep inside Steve.

Maybe its his protective instincts, the ones that Chin, Kono, and the rest of Honululu seem to respond to with abject fear and screaming, but whatever it is it lights Steve on fire from the inside.

It's low and intense, like a trail of gasoline catching fire from an unforeseen spark.

It burns through his dislike of the man, his exhaustion and frustrations of the day; it even burns through the perpetually irrepressable anger Steve always seems to be simmering with these days from knowing that Wo Fat is so close yet so far from his grasp at the same time.

All this is forgotten when Steve sees the photo of the little girl.

He sees the unusually detailed and vindictive report of his failed marriage brought up alongside his file and knows that it's intentional.

He sees Danny's evaluation - puts his anger two and two with what he's been doing here on Hawaii despite the fact that, considering all logical precedent, this island should have never been his home in the first place.

And Steve knows this because Danny is the worst kind of outsider here in Hawaii; the kind that self-destructs, the kind that goes out here for inexplicable reasons, the kind that's sure to draw the ire of every native he comes into contact to simply by being in the same room with them for too long. And Steve?

Steve breaks a little at the sight of Danny and his little girl, sees wounds in him that he knows are perfectly mirrored in his own soul. In the end, it isn't Danny's accomplishments that finally convinces Steve to reach out to him.

It's the knowledge that Steve might be the only one on this island who actually knows what he's going through, the knowledge that he might be the only one who won't give Danny grief for bearing those wounds.

Jenna doesn't sense the change in the atmosphere, but Kono and Chin do. They feel it like a drop in the temperature and the two of them are left openly assessing Steve, cautious of what he's about to do next.

"Kono?" Steve calls out.

"Yeah boss?" Kono sidles up to him, looking at Steve with enough concern on her face to make up for Jenna's cluelessness and Chin's taciturn expression.

"Pull up his number for me." Steve orders.

Kono has the digits up in front of Steve in less than a second.

Steve looks at his phone, wondering what's going on at Danny's end of the line. Steeling himself, Steve presses at the buttons decisively. He hears the call connect. Before Danny can so much as say 'Hello, who the hell is this?', Steve has launched into a spiel, his intention being not giving the other man enough time to get anything out aside from a breath.

"Daniel Williams. This is Lt. Commander Steven J. McGarett. Meet me at Wailana Coffee House half an hour from now. Place's at Waikiki. And by the way, don't be late - I have something important to talk to you about."

Chin shoots Kono a knowing look just as Steve starts heading for the door.

"That sure seemed different." Jenna muses, tone off-hand.

* * * * *

And that is how Steve arrives at the cafe ten minutes earlier than he's supposed to be. He scouts out the area, eyeing the sparse crowd inside for individuals that could arouse his suspicion. Steve frowns to himself, so far none of them are tripping anything though. Steve is about to start on assessing the defensibility of the coffee shop (and after that, accounting for the various entries and exits into the area) when he realizes he's letting his anxiety get to him once again.

Steve trips on empty air.

 _Habits from a not so long ago lifetime_ , he thinks as he recovers his balance.

Steve shakes his head clear of those memories as he goes over the interior of the cafe again, this time looking for serviceable booths instead of potential perps. There's a rueful little smile on his lips as he takes a second to relieve himself fully of that pervasive paranoia. The SEAL mindset is good at keeping him and his task force alive, but when he starts slipping into that mentality outside of work Steve knows that he's only asking for trouble.

He spots a good booth right at the very back of the shop. It's dark, it's secluded, and it's situated at an angle that blocks it from the view of people whose only business is to peep into the interior. He heads that way right now.

Except that someone's got a hand wrapped around his wrist.

Without thinking, Steve breaks out of the grip with a pop of his wrist and in a moment he's got a hand wrapped around the man's arm, twisting it around and pinning it down unto the table hard enough he knows he's on the verge of dislocating something.

There's a scream of pain and Steve flinches, looking up, because he knows where he's heard that voice before.

"I give! I give! Uncle! Oww-- _dammit_ , you neanderthal, won't you let go of my arm already?!"

Steve relinquishes his hold, holding his arms up on either side of him as he looks on in surprise at Danny heaving and puffing out stray strands of ungelled hair from his forehead. Danny pries the side of his face from the table, a murderous expression on his face as he holds his arm close to his chest. He raises his uninjured arm skyward, the action vaguely accusatory as a groan escapes past his lips.

"You know, if you came out here to try and change my impression of you, I have to tell you right now that this? Nearly breaking my arm in half? It isn't doing you any favors in the good graces department, my friend."

"Daniel! Oh God, I'm so sorry-"

"Danny," the man interrupts, "Danny's just fine. Stop calling me Daniel, you savage - I'm having flashbacks of housing court again."

Danny looks up at him at the same time Steve focuses in on his face - and that right there's an awkward moment. The moment is so thick and palpable, with Danny breathing heavily like he just finished a thirty kilometer run and Steve standing there, arms still raised, expression reminiscent of a deer caught in the headlights of a ten-wheeler truck. It's so out there that half the people in the shop are staring at them too like they're Sunday's entertainment.

Danny's the first one to notice that they're attracting everybody's attention in the room so he hisses at Steve to sit down. Surprised into movement, Steve attempts to do so - only that he's heading for Danny's own half of the booth before he can stop himself.

"What is _WRONG_ with you?" Danny prompts, shooing Steve unto the other side of the booth. Super SEAL actually has the nerve to look affronted by his gesticulations. "Are we expecting anyone else? Is there, by any chance, a third party in these proceedings? Did you bring along your personal shrink or are we waiting for somebody with a video camera so you can give me a deposition? Is that the reason why you're crowding in to my seat, huh?"

Seriously, how many words can this guy get out in a minute?

"Nothing's wrong with me." Steve says, managing to speak in what has been a one-sided (lecture) conversation up until now. "Can you keep quiet for a second? I hear you saying a lot of stuff but my brain can only process through them at a regular human being's pace."

"'Regular'," Danny repeats, completely deadpan, "'human being.' You know what - I have to ask, okay? I have to ask you for the sake of my sanity and for the sake of everyone else's on this island who might in the near future start up a conversation with you with the goal of asking the very same questions I myself have about you right now."

"Why are we talking about this?" Steve says, finally getting himself seated, "Aren't we supposed to be talking about other stuff like, I don't know, that thing I actually came here to tell to you about?"

"In a minute babe."

Steve throws his arms up in the air. "Okay, fine, ask me that question - but after this, you will listen to me talk, Mr. Williams."

Danny looks at him with horror. "Did you just address me as 'Mr. Williams?'"

"Yes?" Steve asks, unable to comprehend why he's getting so much grief in this conversation.

"I don't have enough dough in the bank to be called 'Mister' Anything, alright? And anyway," Danny says, gesturing at him sharply with an arm that's making what Steve is pretty sure is the Italian gesture for _what the hell are you saying_ , "Mr. Williams was my father, you ingrate - now, stop distracting me from the topic of this conversation; do you or do you not understand the meaning of the words you just said?"

"Of course I do." Steve protests, "Enough of this Danny, I'm trying to apologize here."

"Oh." Danny says, put out.

Steve shoots him a thankful look.

"Well then, apology denied."

Gratitude dies on Steve's face. His jaw drops open. "What the-" he blusters, "You can't just deny an apology like that!"

"I just did." Danny says, raising an eyebrow at him, "Really, I didn't expect you to be this brain-dead. Even my daughter can talk circles around you - all that superhero training must've taken a toll on your mental faculties."

Steve can't believe he called this man to have a chat with him. Just a few minutes ago, he was shaking off his own brand of insanity. Had he been aware that Danny's presence brought with it its own sense of delirium, Steve would have never bothered with dissipating his own. It's like - if there was a progress bar for this incident (and yes, it's starting to look like talking to Danny pretty much qualifies all on its own as an incident) Steve is extremely confident that for every second he lets this smart-aleck detective talk, he's dragging Steve's progress into the negatives.

"I am not brain dead." Steve says patiently, "I am, however, sorry that I gave you so much trouble back when we first met. That is why I called you up here because I wanted to set a few things straight, up to and including treating you like garbage yesterday."

"Good to hear! But see, you aren't the only one sorry about a few things. You might be sorry about treating me like crap - and by the way, I do approve of your choice of words on describing just how fucking wretched you treated me before - but I, my friend, am not sorry that I yelled at you. If there's anything I am sorry about, it is that I was unfortunate enough to happen unto that crime scene with you still there in the vicinity."

"I am trying to bury the hatchet here." Steve remarks through gritted teeth, "Don't you think you should at least consider my apology since I'm putting so much effort into it?"

Without missing a beat, Danny retorts, "Oh I would! I'd give anybody's apology a second chance. Hell, maybe even a third under different extenuating circumstances. I'd consider anyone's apology provided that it's sincere and, you know, from the heart."

"So why won't you take mine?"

"Because apologizing isn't the only reason why you're here, is it?"

Steve freezes. Danny smiles because he knows he's got him right there.

* * * * *

Thankfully, the waitress decides to arrive right at that moment with percolator in hand. She's a small thing, with tan skin, eyes a little bit high on her face, and dark nondescript hair pulled into a tight bun. She's got earphones on and it's obvious that she's oblivious to what's been going on for the past few minutes.

She pulls out one bud in preparation for serving their drinks. Her gaze runs over Danny without changing even the slightest bit but they do light up upon seeing Steve. Just like that Danny's all but forgotten.

"Here you go sir." The waitress says with a too-sweet smile painted upon her face. She pours him his coffee with practiced motions before attending to Danny with the leftovers of that same smile.

"Enjoy your coffee." She finishes, stepping back away from them with slow, faltering steps.

Danny looks at her the entire time she lingers around their table, clutching a menu in one hand. After a few more moments, sensing Steve isn't into what she's advertising, she turns around in dejection and starts heading towards the door back to the kitchen.

"So," Danny starts, putting his hands together (he's not even going to bother mentioning what just happened), "am I right?"

Steve assumes a plain expression. Danny can tell it's his version of what a poker face is supposed to look like. He doesn't have a problem with it - no, not at all - in fact, by most standards the calm, flawless exterior Steve puts on is exceptional.

But see, faces are Danny's trade.

That is why Danny can see through it as easily as if the steel curtain Steve's got on is nothing more than a paper thin film. He considers calling him out on it - considers telling Steve what exactly is wrong with the screen he has. The look he's giving him is dispassionate, cool, collected; not an ounce of interest concerning present events.

And that right there is his mistake.

Out of impulse, Danny reaches out towards him.

His fingers freeze half-way through the table as he realizes just how ridiculous this gesture must look like to Steven. Clenching them against his palm, Danny covers it up with a pretty decent fabrication of a frustrated groan.

Then he laughs it off, feeling like a fool for a second.

What the hell's he doing? He's talking to a real life, flesh-and-blood human being - not a facial composite of one! Did he really just try to rub at the crinkles surrounding Steve's eyes? Jesus Christ, what would _that_  have done? It's not like he's going to be able to soften those shadows just by smudging at them with a forefinger and a thumb.

Danny puts his arm back, reeling from that one action.

Steve, he doesn't notice. Or at least, his focus is clearly on something else because Danny's slip, well, it slips past him.

"Yes." Steve says, "Yes, okay, apologizing wasn't the only reason why I wanted to talk to you."

Feeling like he's dodged a bullet, the smile that shows up on Danny's face must be frickin' bright. "Yeah, I kinda got that when you asked me to make an appearance here. You know, apologies can be issued over the phone."

"If you refer to an apology as something to be 'issued' Danny, then I don't think it counts as one."

"Modern society doesn't agree with that statement."

Navy man looks at him hard. " Screw modern society - I'm old fashioned."

Danny shrugs, letting it go. He's dying to say the word "clearly" but instead settles for a tame, "Fair enough."

Steve takes a tentative sip of his coffee and silence reigns for a minute.

This unexpected quiet is a blessing. It gives Danny time to go over his experience of the man - no matter how limited it might be. So far, there's nothing he's seen in Steve that explicitly bends any rules or lines - but Danny doesn't let his guard down because he knows the guy's insane. Certifiable, even. He only has to bring up the memory of what he's seen in Steve's file to remind him of that fact.

The man fingers his cup, a tan digit tracing lines against the shining ceramic. When he looks up, Danny can still see the shadow around his eyes - that hint of intensity that completely messes up the look of casual indifference Steve's got going on.

"No leads," Steve sighs, "just in case you're wondering. We've got a witness in our custody currently being sheltered in a location I'm prohibited from disclosing. I am, however, allowed to disclose the fact that she's currently suffering from post-traumatic stress and, as a result, cannot give out accurate descriptions despite having seen one of our killers."

Danny nods. "You're saying killers - does this mean we're looking at multiple hired-guns working for the same organization or are there really just that many murderers currently prowling the streets of this city at the same time?"

Steve shakes his head. "Can't be an organization behind this. Most of the murder vics check out, and none of the crimes seem to display any other motive outside simply killing. If this is the work of an organization then the killers must be really, really disorganized - that or they're working independent from each other."

"That doesn't make sense."

"I know," Steve says, grip over the handle of his cup tightening, "and what's worse is that the deaths, they're unreasonable. None of them looked like they were targeted; in fact, the victims were almost chosen completely out of random."

Danny frowns at Steve. There's something he doesn't get about all this.

"Okay - thank you for the info dump, but would it be rude of me to ask you now what it is we're doing here?"

And oh shit, no sooner are those words out of Danny's mouth when he realizes what it is he's been called for to this cafe - and it isn't so that he and the head of Hawaii's leading crime fighting unit could sit pretty, make niceties, and drink barely passable caffeine.

Because had this gathering been what he had thought it would be, by now he would be shaking down Steve for precious info so that he could begin working on his tail of the investigation. But Steve just informed him about the state of their witness, plus the fact that Five-0 itself hadn't turn up with any leads. The thought that Steve might be lying to him crosses his mind of course, but Danny's a damn good detective; he'd like to imagine that he could spot a liar's tells from a mile away. Not even factoring in his particular specialization, Danny's pretty sure that Steve just told him the truth up-front.

Steve tenses, and Danny can see it - sees that moment with stunning clarity, the kind that makes him mistake his vision into the apocalyptic future for a satirized noon-day documentary of his life - and it all happens with the passing of an eye blink so that when Danny opens them again, Steve's lips are already forming the words and he's too late to stop them.

It's Danny's death sentence - and of all things it's being delivered to him by this man.

A man he could've killed twice-over just from meeting him yesterday.

A man he finds so ridiculously beautiful that he has to stop himself from reaching out every second to make sure this man - Steve - isn't just another face on paper or a specter of ink.

"I find it odd that a detective of your caliber has to conduct an investigation independent from that of HPD's."

When Danny doesn't respond, Steve hammers on. "You don't have to, you know? We've got resources, people behind us. No amount of field experience or determination on your part is going to put a dent on this case and you know it. So... I guess, what I'm trying to say is that-"

"Whatever it is, don't say it." Danny warns.

"-in behalf of Governor Jameson's task force, I'd like to induct you into the 5-0 unit."

Danny's aghast. Has been since this part of the conversation started.  All witticism has gone out the window and now he can't even make his mouth shape the words he needs to say. What comes out instead is a plea so pathetic it really has no business coming out of his mouth,

"You can't. You can't do this to me."

For the first time since they had this conversation, Steve smiles at him, bright and blinding.

"Watch me." He says, one hand on his phone already.

 

III.

 _"No fair_  
_You really know how to make me cry_  
_When you gimme those ocean eyes."_  
_Billie Eilish - Ocean Eyes_

As it turns out, Steve can't get Danny to the witness after all. (Technically, that means he just can't get him to the woman right this instant - but Steve operates on a highly efficient timetable, one that has been working smoothly up until the moment it upends violently due to yet another interruption on the case. So, all things considered, Steve sees this as a failure on his part - or at least his timetable's.)

Good thing though, the interruption turns out to be a very straightforward crime so that's a perk at least.

It's evening and Honululu is lit up like a landing strip for some kind of gigantic plane. There are hot, orange lights in the distance and yellow beams of illumination from cars streaming up and down through tunnels and highways. Right in the middle of downtown though, a firefight is going down and it's all adrenaline, stray shots, and reckless driving - and is it so wrong that Steve feels like he's having the time of his life while hanging out the driver's seat window, on a mission to chase down perps with one hand wrapped around the steering wheel and another fastened on his Taurus PT92?

The car in front of him swerves dangerously close towards the edge as, emulating his example, the driver pops out of his own window and fires two shots in quick succession at Steve. Bracing a hand against the top handle, Steve ducks back inside though he knows there's less than a snowball's chance in hell that any of those bullets will ever come close enough to winging him.

The car twists and turns as the driver attempts to regain control of his vehicle. Flooring the gas pedal, the Camaro streaks past the bare street, allowing him to easily close the gap between him and the suspect. The perp then tries to run him off the road but Steve's been expecting that move all night; brakes engaged, the Camaro stutters to a halt - well-built pistons and customized suspensions allowing him to decelerate into stillness.

Perp expected a collision, has put enough force into the turn that it becomes impossible for him to stay on the road. Without anything to crash into, the car slides past the smooth concrete and unto the patchy grass and uneven dirt - friction making short work of the vehicle entirely.

Breathless, still high from vertigo, Steve watches the perp's car dismantle itself from the force of its own velocity. He steps out of his own car, gun in hand useless, and proceeds to exhale a shaky breath as his training begins to shut down now that the threat's been suitably neutralized.

Looking up from his crouch (Steve isn't aware when he settled down on the ground), he can now hear sirens resounding everywhere. It should be the perfect end to the evening - no bloodshed, short case, free adrenaline high - but then he remembers one teeny, tiny detail. A detail that's about to derail the rest of his evening.

And it comes with the sound of the passenger-side door slamming itself shut with the force of a thousand light-bulbs shattering.

Or maybe just the one. Steve's in particular.

No way is he exaggerating about this. Not at all. Because when he looks up, Danny is looking down at him with murder in mind, and if it wasn't for the fact that Danny's current expression makes it clear that there's going to be a killing soon, Steve would find it very hard to look away from his bottle-blue eyes.

Damn it. What is with him and this man's eyes?

" _What_ ," he says, hands raking through his delicate comb-over, " _the bloody hell is wrong with you?_ _"_

"You're British?" Asks Steve with some surprise.

"I -I picked it up from my wife," Danny takes a few steps towards him before giving up and slumping against the hood of his car, his general air that of a man who's just survived being launched through the windshield of somebody's car,

"-Christ, I can taste bile at the back of my throat. I say again, _what the hell is wrong with you_?"

Steve mulls over the question thoughtfully for a second. "Nothing really. Why do you ask?"

"Because you-" Danny says, his hands going all Italian again, "-God, I don't even know anymore but it feels like you took to thoroughly screwing over about 300 different driving regulations less than a minute of you stepping foot into my goddamn car! What is wrong with you? _Are you insane?_ Does your task force suffer through this exact same ordeal every time the good of people of Hawaii decide to let you loose upon their law-breaking counterparts?!"

"First, I'm not insane," Steve bristles instantly, standing straight up, "the military has very strict parameters in recruitment when it comes to the basis of mental health-"

"Could've fooled me." Scoffs Danny.

"-second, what do you mean I broke over 300 different driving regulations? I bet the number of real regulations don't even come close to half that number-"

"And you know this because you make a habit of breaking as many safety laws as possible whenever you drive?"

"Hey, my driving was perfectly safe-"

"OH MY GOD, safe for WHOM? ME? MY CAR? Or you, you fucking lunatic? I don't know where you came from or what bedeviled experimental program you broke out of but there is nothing safe - _let alone perfect_ \- about _your driving_! You are not _the Terminator_. Regular people die when they brake the car while going 90 and they end cracking open their heads against the steering wheel-"

"Terminator? Steering wheel? _Bedeviled?_ Wha-"

"Stop talking! _Stop talking, okay_?" Danny says, pushing past Steve as he proceeds to pace back and forth in front of the Camaro.

"I know what you're about to say. It is not my fault that my vocabulary is currently tied to your level of insanity. Guess what, the more you do stupid things, the more my words get fancier and fancier! It is, I believe, a misguided notion on my part that if my words somehow become more and more difficult to comprehend, your backwards-working mind would actually find it easier to understand what I'm saying!"

Steve stares at him.

"What?" Danny says, fingers raking - not so much as slashing - through his hair, "What're you staring at me for?"

Steve blinks. "And I'm the insane one here?"

"If I am, only by association." Danny snaps.

Steve opens his mouth, about to discuss at length why Danny should stop using the word insane so much to describe him. For one thing, it's unfair. Steve's seen a lot more crazy back in his time at the Navy - Sam Hanna for one thing outranked him on that scale. He's never going to forget what that man did back in Tel Aviv.

Feeling like he's got the perfect argument for it formed in his head, Steve's about to tell Danny what he thinks when he's interrupted by one of his teammates walking in on them.

"Steve," Kono says, smiling wide at the sight of her boss, "mad driving skills, bruh. You okay though? It looks like that drive winded you."

There's a stream of indecipherable curses from behind them.

" _What are you people complementing his driving for?!_ " Danny shouts.

Steve chuckles, ignoring the shorter man, "Please, that was nothing serious - didn't even get to squeeze off a round at that guy."

"Nice." Kono makes an appreciative noise. "Let me just get this..."

She rifles through the sheaf of papers in her hand, pulls out a document of some sort to hand over to him then stops in mid-air when her gaze is suddenly drawn to the side.

"Wait... is that who I think it is?"

Steve looks over to the side - finds Danny sitting against the hood of his car with a palm on his head, the lower side of his face moving with what Steve presumes to be a litany of dark oaths. He considers drawing his attention to Kono - pegs it as a bad idea for some reason - then turns around only to find that she's no longer where she's been standing earlier.

"Are you okay?" He hears Kono ask from somewhere behind him.

Steve turns back around and there she is, 5-0's very own Tinker Bell - if Tinker Bell came with dark hair, a perfect tan, bones made of steel, and a devastating round-house kick in place of wings and fairy dust. She's in full-comfort mode now, bent down in front of the irate blonde with her voice pitched low in the same way it gets when she's talking to witnesses and trauma vics.

"Fine." Danny says, and Steve is actually surprised the whole low-voice thing actually works, though if he does think about it Danny talking probably has more to do with the fact that it's Kono he's talking to instead of, well, him. "I'm alright now. Everything's under control, my blood pressure is perfectly normal - or at least if I keep telling myself that for the next 30 minutes my blood pressure might actually go in that direction."

Kono cracks a smile, "You know, you're funny. There wasn't anything in the file that said you were funny."

"Well," Danny says, looking up from his hands and oh wow is he actually starting to smile? - Steve looks on in disbelief, "skating over illegal access and all that - seeing the word 'funny' on a police report has vastly different connotations to seeing the same word anywhere else, so just between you and me? I think I'd rather remain classified as 'anti-social' and 'volatile' under my file."

Kono laughs at this, although Steve's pretty sure the entire thing's a fabrication, a manipulation on Kono's part to get Danny to ease up and start relaxing. Honestly he doesn't understand why the other man isn't seeing it - he's a detective for crying out loud, and those jokes aren't even that funny or witty.

But then again, having a bombshell like Kono openly laughing at your jokes is sure to fry some processors. Really, Steve shouldn't be surprised at all.

"You part of 5-0, right?" Danny asks, "Tell me - has your boss always been this screwed in the head?"

"Pretty much." Kono tells him, doesn't even take a second to mull over the question in her head.

"And... you all just go along with the things he makes you do?"

"We feel responsible," she says, nodding, and Steve can't help but feel that somehow this entire line of questioning is hitting a little too close to home to not be intentional, "you know, like one of those situations where you know you can't stop it from happening so you just go along with and hope that by the end of it, there's still something left for damage control? That's what it's like."

"Hey!" Steve shouts at them, "You two do realize that I can hear everything you're saying about me?"

"Yes." The two of them reply at the same time.

At a glare from Steve, Kono's bright smile tapers off into nothing. She looks towards Danny - himself looking at Steve with as much hostility as one man could possibly put out there for the whole world to see - slaps a hand on one shoulder and says,

"I'm Kono Kalakua by the way."

"Danny Williams." He tells her, "Great to know that you're not all delusional in 5-0."

Oh if he only Knew, Steve thought to himself.

In answer, Kono just gives the detective a cryptic smile. "Yeah."

She turns back to Steve, all traces of her happy-go-lucky self suddenly melting off into smooth professionalism. With her hands still clutching several sheets of paperwork, she retrieves the one she nearly handed over to him earlier and goes around the car to pull the document up in front of the two of them.

The file has nothing to do with the runaway perp, it's yet another update on their forgetful witness. Steve expects to see the usual humdrum - but then concludes that if Kono actually took the time to leave HQ to meet up with him despite his preoccupation with Dominic Toretto over here, then there must be new developments.

Quickly scanning over it, Steve absorbs the bare essentials: the witness is starting to recall bits and pieces of her experience while the crime was on-going. He looks up, sees his own determination reflected in Kono's face and nods.

"You go on ahead," Steve orders, "get Chin to call-up Dr. Samuel from his clinic and have him over the witness' shelter in an hour. Hopefully, now that the woman's starting to remember a few things the good doctor might help her recover more details faster."

"Will do Steve." She says as she walks away.

Steve watches her weave through the crowds with ease, and in no time at all Steve loses her in the press of the bodies going through the wreckage and the medical team fussing over the bruised and battered body of the carjacker. He hears a sigh bordering on painful from behind him and turns a head to the side in time to see Danny sidle up next to him.

"You do know she was just reading you, right?" He asks.

"Yes." Danny says reluctantly, "I was aware. Subtle, though, isn't she?"

"That sarcastic?"

"No."

There's a brief silence over them as Steve, attention momentarily drawn to the sight of an ambulance pulling up to the side of the road, watches the man he'd been pursuing get himself heaved unto a stretcher and moved towards the open back of the vehicle.

Danny isn't saying anything at all. He's being quiet - too quiet. Steve figures he's just thinking things over, or more likely reeling in his temper from his last outburst. When Steve finally notices how long the silence has been, the entire medical team's packed and are already heading their way home; even the few remaining officers of HPD are beginning to make their final rounds before closing the crime scene for good. In all that time, Steve realizes, Danny hasn't said anything.

Steve might have only known this man from a confrontation yesterday and the better part of an afternoon spent arguing in a coffee shop, but in all that time not once did Danny go completely silent the way he is now. It doesn't suit him, this moroseness. Steve wants to ask him what he's thinking but going on from what he'd seen earlier, he decides instead to keep his mouth shut.

Danny is fidgety.

No, not fidgety, more like intense, Steve corrects.

He talks too much, waves his hands around too much, paces back and forth like he's hell-bent on wearing a path on just about anything he's standing on - like he's got too much energy, too much heat, too much... frustration (yeah, that's it) for one man alone to contain. It's one thing for Steve to recognize instability from his actions, but it's another thing for him to feel it this way - coming off from Danny in irradiating waves like he's a furnace in an already scorching day.

It's off-putting to say the least.

Danny finally lets out a breath, and once again Steve feels like he's been the one holding it. He exhales himself, can't help but do so seconds after Danny himself does it - he doesn't know why, it's so confusing - and he still doesn't understand how the man can wind him up so much simply from shutting up too long when he turns his head a little bit to the side and sees Danny's gaze on him.

 _Fire_ , Steve thinks. There's fire on him; on his arms, on his legs, settling on every one of his hairs, there's even one burning through his chest like a fucking torch and he doesn't understand.

"I give up," Danny laments, "I give up goddammit. This is not what I wanted - this isn't-"

He bites down on his next words like it actually pains him to say it out loud.

"Fine." He says the word as if it meant more than just acquiescence, "I'll join up with your task force - but only just this once. When we're done working on these homicides - or god forbid everything about this case goes to hell then at the very first sign of the shit-storm I'm pulling out, regardless of what you or the Governor of this damn tropical hellhole has to say on the matter."

Is there really any room for him to disagree? Steve nods.

Danny looks at him as if Steve still doesn't understand the point of what he's saying. He reaches out to him - like he did earlier that afternoon - and as before, his hand clenches into a fist and Steve watches as that same fist falls softly on his chest. His knuckles are up against his heart, he can practically feel his heartbeat bouncing off the man's fingers and back into his own chest. There's something accusatory in that gesture, something Steve should really take offense about but really, there's nothing in him left - nothing but spent kindling; everything that could've caught fire already has.

"You don't own me, McGarett. I'm only helping you because I need help - and I can't get that anywhere else except from you so that's why I'll stick around. But the moment I decide this is done, then it's done, you hear me?"

Again, Steve can only nod.

"Great." Danny says, slapping his hands together. The spell breaks.

Steve blinks and clearly Danny is expecting him to say something about what he just said - which is only normal since Danny, a detective with barely any pull on his own precinct, just gave one of the most powerful men in all of Honolulu an ultimatum that he can in no way back up.

But what comes out from his mouth instead is, "Where do you get off at calling me McGarett?"

Danny smirks, "Free perk of the relationship, babe - I stick around, I get to call you anything I want."

"Then call me Steve."

Steve hears the plea in his voice. Danny doesn't. Is that a good thing?

The blonde man looks at him for a moment and all Steve can think is how much he's thankful that he can't see the blue in his eyes tonight.

"Fine. _Steve,_ " he says slowly, "I think it's about time I pay your witness a visit."

* * * * *

So Steve takes Danny to the motel.

It's a grungy little thing, and by all rights it should be as ugly as the ones that appear in the mainland - but here in Hawaii, there's green vegetation all around; perfect shrubbery and palm fronds decorating everything so despite the decrepit aura of the establishment, the area comes off instead as artfully aged.

 _So unfair_ , Danny thinks.

At least the drive here was alright (and by alright, Danny means uneventful - as in nothing else that threatened hair-pulling on his part happened). Steve seems to have thankfully taken everything he had to say earlier to heart, though Danny somehow doubts this recalling the sight of Steve's white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

When they arrive, the first thing he does is book a room for himself. There's no reason why he should be feeling so weary right now even though it's midnight since he did wake up in the middle of the afternoon. He checks his calendar, determines that the coming weekend is a no-Grace-weekend and resigns himself to the idea that he'll be spending an inordinate amount of time helping the walking loose cannon Steve with this investigation.

He tries to dial Meka's number and stops short before actually doing so. What's he doing, calling Meka in the middle of the night? Guy should be at home in bed with Amy. He doesn't want to disturb anything going on - God knows Meka puts up with him enough times already during the day, he doesn't want to start forcing his problems on him the few times he actually gets to lie in.

Sighing to himself, Danny's headed towards the room - his room - when Steve pops out from another one himself and gestures for Danny to come in with him.

"What?" He asks irritably.

Steve makes a face at him. "I thought you should meet the witness."

Danny blanks, "Really? It's past midnight-" He pulls up the left sleeve of his shirt to take a peek at his watch, "- 1:28 to be exact. Our witness still up?"

"Um, no." Steve admits.

This elicits a growl of exasperation from the shorter man. "Oh, so she's not! So, pray tell me, Steven, what's the point of me going into the witness' room this late in the evening? Should I start interrogating her in the hopes she mumbles something in her sleep that proves vital to the case?"

"You were the one who said you wanted to meet up with the witness."

"Yes," Danny confirms while wringing his hands, "but I never said anything about meeting her right now. I was under the impression we could still do that tomorrow morning, preferably after a good breakfast and a decent cup of coffee to sedate that part of me still reeling from the knowledge of your existence. Now can I please go?"

"Would you just-" Steve says, hands going up in a 'what's-wrong-with-you?' gesture.

Danny follows grudgingly.

The motel room is plain, teetering on ugly. It's not enough vegetation abounds outside, whoever painted the room also had to choose the most god-awful green color Danny has ever seen to decorate the interior. Against the rough, bumpy walls, the paint makes the entire room look like it's been overgrown with moss and lichen.

There are two single beds inside, separated by just the exact amount of space needed to put in an equally ugly bedside table. It's bare of paraphernalia except for a single lamp currently casting sputtering light. One bed is unoccupied though the sheets are tangled and the pillows are a mess.

What Danny presumes to be the witness is lying on the other bed. She's native too by the looks of her skin tone - natural tan compared to the monstrosities Danny's seen back in Jersey (like you could get an honest-to-God tan back there). Her eyes are undoubtedly Asian, carved into a soft, plump face that makes her look girlishly beautiful - Danny has to actively remind himself that the witness is a 32 year old woman instead of a teenager.

She's curled into one side, her face reflecting her anxiety even through sleep. Beside her, dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a faded-out blue shirt two sizes too big for his skinny body is Dr. Samuel. He's looking on at the woman's sleeping profile with worried eyes.

The sound of Steve coming back into the room draws his gaze to the door.

"How is she doc?" Steve asks as he walks over to the side of the room - taking care to angle his body away from the window as he passes. Danny imitates his example but finds when he gets to his destination that the room is actually smaller than he thinks so he ends up squeezing himself into Steve's personal space.

With much silent grumbling, he tells Steve to edge along further to the side. Steve complies wordlessly though he's only an inch away from embracing the wall. The good doctor looks at them quizzically, but after a few seconds he shrugs like whatever it is he's thinking is none of his business.

"Fine enough." He tells them, "I'm not really the person you should be consulting with this about - I deal with physical injuries and the like. Had this loss of memory been caused by a blow to the head I might have actually been able to help you, but it isn't so I can't offer you anything Commander."

Steve nods in understanding. "Still, thank you for coming doctor. At least you kept her company."

The man smiles. Though the smile doesn't quite reach his eyes, there's genuine warmth in them. "That was the least I could do - after all, it would have been cruel of me to leave behind a woman suffering from paranoia."

"And for that you have our most sincere gratitude."

Danny looks at the doctor, takes note of his drooping eyes, his slow movements, and the way he keeps on staring off at nothing in particular. "Why don't you get some sleep, doc? Me and Commander McGarett can keep watch over her for a while. In fact, isn't that sort of like our job?"

"No, no," the man says, waving him off, "I can still keep going for a few hours, gentlemen. Anyway, I know you two have been busy all day with your investigation. If anybody needs rest it's you two."

"No." Steve says firmly. "We can't ask that of you, Dr. Samuel. You're a civilian, you shouldn't have had anything to do with this case in the first place - let alone be in charge of keeping an eye out for a material witness. We'll take over from here so you should go get some sleep as well."

Sensing that the SEAL won't take no for an answer, the doctor's only response is to sigh aloud, give them one last nod before heading towards his own bed. He's out cold by the time Danny and Steve are reclining against identical chairs that came along with the room, discussing information about the woman currently lying in fitful slumber before them.

"Her name's Hana Noe'au," Steve recites from memory, "personal assistant to the deceased Ian McDougal, one of many senior partners making up Hakumei Trading Tech. Victim was gunned down in his office around 2:30 in the afternoon - three shots to the chest with 9mm bullets. Hana supposedly survived the encounter by hiding beneath the table inside the conference room."

"Odd, aren't most conference room tables made up of glass?"

Steve frowns at him as if saying 'really, Danny?'. "Not all, but yes, most of them are. Anyway, there weren't any surveillance cameras in the room - the building was designed so that surveillance could only be done over the respective entrances and exits of each floor. About six minutes before the shooting occurred, the recording was tampered with causing it to reuse old footage. By the time the mistake was rectified, panic was already ensuing in the building."

"Okay..." Danny slurs, slumping against the backrest of his chair, "...typical post-shooting behavior - panic - nothing I haven't heard about. Will you hurry up and get to the point, Steve? I'm dying for some shuteye here."

"So impatient." Steve mutters underneath his breath. "Maybe I should reconsider hiring you."

"What was that?"

"Nothing." Steve coughs a few times before continuing, "Anyway, the assailant squeezed off four rounds - one to scare off the people on the floor, and the other three ended up in our dead vic. Forensic says the shooter fired the bullets from the door to the conference room so there was no way our witness could've escaped."

"So then..." Danny starts, realizing. "There was no way the killer should have left her alive."

"Exactly. There was nothing in that room that could've served as substantial cover, nothing at all except for a table - which as you had so put it, was made of glass. That means the killer saw our witness plain as day, and that he left her alive on purpose."

Danny directs his gaze to the sleeping woman. His vision flakes off into dark patches.

And that's it - that's the final straw. Danny stands straight up.

Damn Steve and his reckless driving, damn him and this fuck fest. Damn the fact that he slept for nearly 20 hours and yet his body still feels like shit even after all that time spent in an extended state of unconsciousness.

"Woah, hey, what're you doing?" Steve asks, rising halfway from his seat. He's got a hand out as if to pull him close but Danny knows that's just his brain coming up with crazy associations. Steve's hands are coaching him to sit back down; Danny doesn't make any move to follow.

At this angle, with the weak sputtering light behind him, Steve looks different. The light is soft against his sharp features, casting shadows against plains of skin and stubble. His hair is graying, Danny muses, and somehow he ends up with a freaking smile on his face because he ends up imagining what Steve would look like with a head full of silver - which just ends up giving him a throat too dry to make swallowing easy.

"I'm-" Danny says, hands compulsively slicking back his hair as he tries to banish that image (who's he kidding? As if he'd get that picture out of his head anytime soon) "-I'm off to bed. What does it look like I'm doing?"

"But..." Steve starts, "We're not done discussing things here."

"Actually, I am. I am SO done with discussing things."

Steve makes a face at him. Danny files it under his rapidly growing 'I-have-no-idea-how-to-translate-this' mental drawer.

"Haven't you been on stake-outs before?" Steve asks, chuckling, voice soft with exhaustion and slightly teasing. Bad enough that this man's got him itching to draw his likeness on paper, now his voice has to start taking on this stupid, stupid sexy edge.

Okay, this is bad, like, very bad. Meka's voice is soft jazz, right? The kind you hear on beat-up radios while sipping coffee on the backseat of a cab, watching windows fog up with condensation from rain and air conditioning? Well, Steve's is worse. A thousand times worse.

Steve's voice, the soft, raw rasp of his words; it may not be anything like Meka's but goddamn is it real and fucking doing wonders to his cock - it drags at his hearing, less like sound and more like phantom touches, rough palms and indelicate fingers wrapping around the base of his -

And oh my god, you're not going there Williams, you are absolutely no fucking fuck fucking way going there oh my god.

"Yes!" Danny shouts on the first syllable of the word and ends up drawing out a second softer one when he notices Hana flinch at the sound. Steve's gesturing at him hard and Danny takes a seat once more, if only so he could put his aching knees to rest and take the necessary amount of time to formulate a response to that question that doesn't border on drunken incoherence.

"Yes," Danny repeats, "I have been on many, many stake-outs before Commander, I have been on a lot of them - enough to know that it is unfair of you to make correlations between those past experiences of mine and this one."

"Oh yeah, how are they any different?" Steve challenges.

"Simple, Steve. For one thing I was briefed, therefore I was physically, psychologically, and spiritually prepared for the experience. Two, I had coffee. Gallons of that stuff, just awaiting consumption, and three, most importantly, none of my prior experiences involved spending time with people like you."

"Am I supposed to take offense with that last statement?"

"No. You're supposed to take that statement into careful consideration because you are - and don't think that I am not aware that I'm utilizing a term from the wrong military branch here - but you are FUBAR, my friend. You are so FUBAR it hurts. You are a living, breathing monkey wrench - and what's worse is that I'm getting all this FUBAR-ness vibe from you from the first day alone."

"Why are you so mouthy?" Steve says in turn, and fuck it his voice is still pitched low, "And loud? Is this just a thing of yours or does every other cop back in Newark suffer from the same compulsion for smartassery as you do?"

"Smartassery?"

"You know what," Steve says, capitulating against Danny's pointed glare, "you're tired, I get it. Fine. I'll go over the files on my own, I'll stand watch over the witness and the doc on my own - it'll be like I never brought you here with me."

"Good," Danny says, already out of the chair and turning the knob on the door, "thank you for being so understanding."

He quickly closes the door to the room, but not before hearing one last remark from the other man inside.

"No problem. What's another night without company?"

 

IV.

 _"My friend, friend_  
_We've come to an end_  
_I painted this picture but the colors don't blend_  
_And now I can't deal cause I'd rather be real instead."_  
_FRND - Friend_

Hana turned up with new details concerning the identity of their killer - not that any of them were really of any help. Most of the things she recalled were impressions, either too insignificant to help or things 5-0 had already uncovered in their own investigation. As it turns out, bringing a sketch artist like Danny (not that Danny would ever respond to such a rudimentary label of his work) here was a bit premature of Steve's plan. So far all he's been able to do for the past three days was to talk Hana into giving him more headaches.

He's not complaining though. The motel, shabby though it might be, is still several levels of magnitude better in comparison to the claustrophobic hell he calls his apartment. Looking back, Danny is honestly surprised he never ended up developing cabin fever in that place. Funny how a good night's sleep somewhere else can end up giving you reservations about your own flat.

Having said that, the motel presents its own share of complications - number one on that list being none other than the head of 5-0 who, by the way, through some cruel twist of fate ended up sharing his own room with Danny's for the entire duration of their stay.

Danny tried getting himself reassigned, okay? But he figured if there was ever a time to start reconciling their differences it would be now, while fate's too busy fucking around with Danny's accommodations to start messing with his interpersonal affairs.

And that's how they ended up settling into a routine - and that's where all the confusion also started.

Steve isn't... unlikable. Sure, he's insane and impulsive, and there's that small matter concerning his reckless disregard for safety - his own and that of others - that makes Danny pretty sure that whatever training the man had undergone back in the day, it not only turned him into a super soldier but it also cost him bits and pieces of his humanity.

That might have been a tad bit overstated. Still though, hearing Steve give orders to tactical squads over the speaker phone gives Danny chills. Talk about laser-guided focus. The Terminator's got nothing on Steve whenever he's putting up the SEAL facade.

Steve's also OCD. Door's closed at all times, things arranged in a manner that screams clockwork to anyone looking - and speaking of clockwork, who the hell wakes up at 5:30 on the dot every morning just so they could go out to sea and catch some waves at an hour when the only thing reasonable people should be catching are some zzzs?

Steve isn't unlikable. He's mental and Danny's got the laundry list to prove it. But despite everything, he's actually a very, very decent human being.

He makes coffee. For two. Danny doesn't know where the man gets his coffee grounds from but if he were asked to hazard a guess, he'd say Steve gets them from heaven itself. He wakes up Danny every morning at 7:00 like he's out to prove Danny's new alarm clock is nothing more than just a waste of credit - and sad to say, with Steve around Danny's clock really IS nothing more than just a waste of credit.

And the arguments! Arguing has always been embedded in Danny's DNA - he can't go by a single day without at least starting a few apoplectic explosions here and there. It doesn't matter if it’s a perp, a suit, a junkie, or a civ, Danny likes running his mouth. And usually people don't like being in arguments with Danny - especially since only a precious few have ever managed to beat him in his own game.

Arguing with Steve though is almost cathartic. He lets the man talk like Steve knows Danny can't stop - can't stop being sarcastic or snarky, can't stop being the man who always has to get the last word in. Steve laughs it off good naturedly, and he gets Danny's references like they're a second language to him. Their verbal spars are rapidly becoming a thing of legend, especially since the last time they had one they were on call for another check-up on a lead and had conveniently forgotten that Kono was still on the other end of the line when they started arguing about capital punishment, Canadian French, and deep dish pizza.

(The argument was about pizza originally - how it got to the other two none of them knew.)

Danny's happy. Fuck it, he is.

That's why, fourth day coming, he finds it so hard to look at Steve when he wakes up earlier than he's supposed to.

The blue of dawn is coming through the shades and Steve is sitting on the edge of his bed, back towards him. Danny knows something's happened because he's still dripping wet, the only article of clothing on him nothing more than a pair of black boxers that are so low-cut it practically begs people to start sinning the moment they lay eyes on him.

He's done a great job working through distraction. Danny remembers the last time he slipped up - the moment he tried to reach out for Steve like he was a goddamn wax figurine, soft and pliable, ready to give way underneath anyone's fingers. Danny hasn't suffered impulses like that since Rachel. He misses the lure of drawing someone who actually does it for him.

Still, Steve? Really? The man may come with a laundry list reading "fucked-up", but if Danny's starting to develop... things. For Steve. Then he's damn sure his own "fucked-up" list just got longer.

"What's that?" Danny asks, not an ounce of sleep left in him. The sight of Steve wrecked before him wiped out all possibility of him needing rest anytime soon.

Steve angles a side of his face towards him and Danny can see he's genuinely spooked, disturbed. He's got a hand on something - a manila envelope. The sight of Danny looking on at him prompts Steve to cradle the thing to his wet chest despite the knowledge the thing's made of paper.

"Nothing." He breaths, "Nothing, Danny. Go to sleep."

"I can't." Danny says, "Your bad vibes are killing my good ones. If I go to sleep now I won't dream of Jersey and pineapple-free pizza - I don't want to take the risk of closing my eyes and having yet another one of those dreams with Kamekona spooning me with shrimp tofu, okay? So no, I'm not going back to sleep."

Steve looks momentarily taken aback by what Danny says. "You dream of _Kamekona_ doing that to you?"

 _Not really_ , Danny thinks, and then he goes red all over. It doesn't help that he means something completely different with the word spooning, but he doesn't mention that of course.

"Hey!" Danny tries to shout, but early morning makes him sound like run over crap so his voice comes across as strangled. Coughing, then swallowing a few times, Danny tries again,

"Hey, last time I checked the only merchandise the whale had you try was that avocado flavored bowl of shaved ice. You didn't get a taste of that gelatinous-"

Danny's insides squeeze together like his intestines are screaming out from the recollected horror of the meal. He decides not to finish that sentence.

"Point is." He says, tasting bile at the back of his throat, "Thing was - revolting. I am perfectly in my rights to suffer nightmares about that - that pile of goo. Now can we get back to topic? What's that you're holding?"

"An envelope." Steve sighs. He holds it up to the side the better for Danny to see the handwriting. It spells out Steve's name but that's just about it.

"Someone's been sending you love letters?"

He shakes his head. "No."

The dismissal in his voice is obvious. Danny doesn't want them to stop talking, particularly because he's caught Steve off-guard - and something tells him Steve isn't the kind of person who normally lets his guard down around most people.

But all thought of pursuing the thread of the conversation lies suspended - not with Danny barely awake and sedated, and certainly not with Steve flashing so much wet and naked flesh in the other man's direction. A barely discernible dawn streams through the windows, steel blue light turning everything in the vicinity into a caricature of shadow.

Steve is nothing but a dark silhouette in the room yet Danny can see the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the slight tremble accompanying every single one of his movements. Steve is shivering, undoubtedly; strong, ocean winds are making the windows shake and rattle, bitter cold seeping through gaps in the door and the ventilation.

Steve can't stop shaking.

If it wouldn't be considered such an inappropriate reaction, Danny would have turned on the lamp (which happens to be an exact replica of the one in Hana's room) and gotten out his sketchpad all for the sake of getting all this - Steve naked, cold, and unguarded, his bedsheets crumpled beside him, cheap motel room lit only by an uncharacteristically weak Hawaiian sun - on paper.

It would be like the morning after a one night stand - Steve waking up to find whatever solace he had found that evening gone by the first light of day. The image comes so strong to Danny he might as well start hallucinating about the smell of sex in the room.

Which brings about unfortunate complications.

Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, Danny coughs a few times. The lid on his vivid imaginings has gone missing and all he can think about is ink, skin, heat, cold, paper, and Steve; Steve's hair graying at the roots, Steve's eyes when they're lined with devastation, Steve's smile - so shy yet utterly lacking of conceit. The dimples on his cheek, the unabashed way he carries himself, even the way he never seems to run out of those goddamn cargo pants - all these from five days alone, Danny thinks.

All these images and impressions just from five days spent in close quarters with this man.

He doesn't want this. Doesn't think he candle this situation so early in the bloody morning.

Danny rolls out of bed gracelessly - he needs to get the hell out of this room.

He desperately needs somebody to talk him out of the things he's on the verge of doing because this? This isn't healthy. Not at all.

Not when Steve is proving to be the exact opposite of what Danny thought he would be.

He grabs a jacket off the lonely coat rack, not even bothering to check with his clothes to know whether or not the ensemble is decent enough for public showing.

He gets out, frowns at the weather (this has to be the first ever thunderstorm he's seen since his flight out Newark), runs a hand through his blonde, disheveled hair and almost trips on the metal staircase in his haste to get out.

He doesn't get very far before Steve is running out to check on him.

"Hey, where you going all of a sudden?"

"None of your business." Danny gets out in a flat voice. He looks at Steve out of the corner of his eye - luckily the man's put on a shirt so Danny doesn't get a full-body shock from the mere sight of his chest.

Steve's expressionless, but there's a vague note of accusation in his voice when he next speaks, "You know this is a pretty extreme reaction just for being refused an elaboration Danny, even for you."

"Wow, you must only think of yourself, do you? This isn't about you, Commander. You can keep your secrets to yourself, I'm not interested in them - I just remembered something extremely important hence my sudden departure."

"I don't believe you." Steve says plainly, stopping in his tracks.

Danny rolls his eyes and continues walking stopping only when he's about halfway towards the driveway. He turns around, not believing he's actually going to dignify that statement with a response.

Steve is looking at him with one of those inscrutable looks of his. For an artist, Danny amuses himself with the belief that he's pretty well acquainted with the study of faces, and most of the time that seems to be the case. Sometimes Steve is so painfully easy to read, but other times - just like now - Steve's apparent invulnerability in the form of shock and bullet-proofing might as well extend to his emotions.

Danny shrugs because that seems to be the only gesture right now that would make any sense in this context.

"You're right," Danny says, unsure why he's going with the truth, "of course you're right. I forgot the universe was out to screw with me."

Steve steps close towards him. "What is it Danny?"

Fingers on his temples, Danny turns tail. He heads back towards the direction of the driveway and Steve follows him stubbornly.

"I need to talk with someone." He addresses the trailing figure. Aside from the ever constant sound of distant waves and seagulls overhead, the only thing breaking the silence is the crunching of gravel underneath their feet. Well, that, and the sound of Danny's heart breaking out in staccato beats, deafening against his own hearing.

"What?" Steve says, uncomprehending, "Does the motel lack for conversation or something? You were doing just fine with me, Hana, and the doc the past few days."

"See Steve that is exactly my point. Tantalizing you and your insanity might be as a conversational piece, you're not exactly the most agreeable person to talk to."

Steve actually laughs at this. "And, what? You think talking to you is so easy? You bruise egos left and right, break island etiquette so many times in a single sit-down that it's almost like bringing a grenade with me that's missing pins."

"Careful Steven," Danny growls, "I can back out of this anytime I want."

"But you won't."

Danny's finally at his car, one hand fastened around his keys, the other one settling on the driver's seat handle of the Camaro Steve seems to have fallen under the delusion that he actually owns. He looks over one shoulder, the simple statement ringing in his ears.

"You won't back out." Steve says confidently. "You won't leave, Danny."

"How do you know?" He asks, angry for no reason he can identify. The anger - this anger - seems to have risen out of him and knocked him into his elbows and knees like the undertow to a tidal wave.

Steve doesn't reply immediately, his eyes assessing of Danny. Finally, he looks down, as if he's only just realized just how angry he made the other man with his presumptions. Steve is solemn with his next words.

"Promise me first," he says, "that this isn't about me keeping secrets. Then I'll tell you why I think you won't leave."

Danny purses his lips. After a few seconds, he nods.

Steve smiles at him. A small one, a quick curve to his lips that lasts only for a second before disappearing.

"You don't leave people Danny. It's other people who do."

Steve turns around, just like that. With no idea how to take in that response, Danny gets into his car and begins speeding down the highway like he's trying to get himself wrapped around a telephone pole. It's only when he gets to his apartment, his sole intention that of picking up the phone to call Meka and maybe Rachel to ask about future plans with Grace that the sentence finally hits.

And it hits like a bullet through the brain. It's savage, grey-matter-on-the-couch bloody, and completely unfair. It leaves Danny reeling and weak at the knees when he realizes just how much he finds the statement to be true.

* * * * *

Jenna's a lifesaver.

After whatever that thing with Danny was, Steve found himself pacing back in their room. The mysterious envelope filled with stolen evidence from his father's toolbox is still lying on the covers of his bed and he can't bear to look at it for some reason. Normally about now he'd be ripping up the thing with fervor, desperate to see if there's anything incriminating the perpetrator could have left behind.

Which is why he knows something's wrong with him.

He actually managed to forget about Wo Fat these past few days. He's not sure how - maybe it has something to do with the motel, how far it is from HQ, the notable absence of his colleagues and friends, or maybe it has something to do with the company. A witness who could not be any more unreliable, a washed out physician who has far too much time on his hands, and Danny.

Danny who's about to give him a pulmonary edema. Danny who's tireless cynicism actually manages to make him laugh. Danny who freaks out at and leaves on early shirtless mornings.

 _Couldn't be_ , Steve thinks.

All things considered, he's had better company before compared to these people - although if he's being completely honest with himself he'd admit that he's never met anyone quite unlike Danny.

See, Steve obsesses over people. He himself is aware of this fact (thank God). So in the absence of his usual murderous, sociopathic rage towards Wo Fat, unusually enough Danny's Jersey drawl has taken up residence instead. He's not sure how he feels about this exactly. He'd imagine having someone like Danny inundating you with a running mental commentary 24/7 would drive anyone batshit. Instead, he finds it reassuring - which he figures just makes him insane.

That's when Jenna comes in.

He's saved from further introspection when their second newest recruit barges in through the door and says, "I need to talk to you."

"Talk." Steve says curtly.

Jenna blinks at him, dazzled for a moment. Steve looks down and realizes he's still basically dripping on the decor. Frowning to himself, he tries to put on an authoritarian air - arms crossed against his chest, stern eyes making laser beams at Jenna through the wet fringe of his hair - though the effect is slightly muted by the unmaskeable shivering in his arms and knees.

Jenna pointedly looks at Steve's face (and only his face) as she crosses the threshold of the room and hands over a folder. Steve takes it from her gingerly, trying hard to touch only the very edges of the document so that he won't end up putting splotch marks all over the pages.

Flipping through the report, what he finds surprises him. He looks up at Jenna and it's clear from her expression that she's been expecting this very reaction - incredulity - from Steve all morning.

"How?" Steve asks.

Jenna flashes him a smile. "I still have contacts back at the CIA commander. I had one of my most trusted associates go over some of the case files on unsolved international crimes and he happened to pick out this pattern among many - I think it's the real deal."

"Bravo." Steve says, closing the folder. "If this is correct Jenna, you might have just given 5-0 its first ever, honest-to-God lead on this case."

Jenna turns scarlet. It’s actually quite cute seeing her looking so flustered. Steve drops the folder back unto the sheets and starts to head out.

"Where are you going?" Jenna asks, perplexed.

Steve dresses quickly a few feet away from the doorframe. Grey sunlight is streaming through the clouds, except for the parts where the heavy cloud cover breaks away to let in true morning radiance. The alternating light and darkness paints the rest of the island in psychedelic streaks. It's like the island itself is having an identity crisis.

Somehow those two words seem to be incredibly significant for some reason. Steve can't put a finger on it but decides rather quickly that if he can't figure it out, maybe it isn't that significant after all. All done with dress-up, he shoots a sideways glance at Jenna Kaye from outside the door.

"You coming?"

Jenna takes a second to answer.

"Sure," she says, as if just coming back to herself. Jenna pushes past Steve and into the gravel path back to the manager's office. Steve's about to tell her to head the other way but decides against it. Girl's going to find her way back anyway.

He's about to stroll out the door completely when a memory tugs at him from the deeper recesses of his mind. Hesitating on the steps, Steve turns back around.

There, on the coat rack, is Danny's forgotten jacket. Steve recalls him picking one off earlier when he stormed out on one of his impulsive whims. He probably grabbed someone else's jacket by mistake, and it couldn't have been his because God knows just how much Steve finds jackets necessary in a place like Hawaii - probably Dr. Sam's or another tenants or whatever.

Danny's jacket is worn, simple. A modest brown thing with letters so faded on the back that they're only one wash away from getting completely erased. Steve looks at it for all but two seconds before taking it off the rack and feeling it in between his fingers.

The fabric is thin enough to be useless. Steve pulls it up before him, not knowing why he's acting so weird over just somebody's left behind jacket. But then again, it isn't just somebody's jacket - it's Danny's.

It even smells like him - like cheap shampoo and just a hint of that cool and bitter scent that Steve has come to associate as Danny's hair gel. The thing also smells inexplicably of coffee, so much so that it stops Steve short when the scent of it has him diving head-first into the memory of their first ever civil discussion back at the coffee house.

From there it only takes his brain to forge a few more associations before he's drowning back again in Danny's blue, blue eyes.

He drops the jacket in disorientation.

It's almost symbolic, really, him letting go of the thing like that - almost like coming up for air. Steve has the vague impression that he's been squeezing the material hard enough to cut it with his nails and sure enough, when he flips the thing over he sees the indentation left behind by his digits.

His heart pounding, Steve decides to ball up the jacket in his hands before lobbing it at Danny's bed. He exits quickly, eyes searching for his Camaro when he realizes that of course it couldn't possibly be there, Danny has it- would have taken it - it is his after all - with him when he decided to go to wherever it was he said he was going.

Thank God Jenna has a car. That would have been awkward.

He takes over the driving, leads Jenna back to HQ, parks the car then gets himself a cab so he could make his way back to the McGarett household.

But home doesn't stop him from feeling like the whole world is spinning.

Steve's experiences with alcohol have been few and far between - like sex - he only imbibes in it whenever he really, truly needs it. Even then though, the question of whether or not getting drunk or laid would really be necessary has always been up for debate in his head. Scrubbed raw, Steve subsists on nothing but bare essentials.

But this won't cut it. Not today.

Two steps into the living room and his knees give out and all he can think of is what the fuck is wrong with you? His back is up against the wall, every muscle in his body clenched as if he's a bullet being squeezed through the nuzzle of a sniper rifle. Is he drunk? Intoxicated? High? He runs down the possibilities, getting frustrated over the sheer physicality of this reaction.

And what's so laughably outrageous about this is that Steve- Steve is a goddamn Navy S.E.A.L! If he didn't know better, he would've have assumed that the reason why he's now panting, out of breath, flat on his back against the wall feeling strained like a spring pulled taut to its absolute limits would be because he had been poisoned.

It could be literally anything - nerve gas, a biochemical agent, weaponized smallpox - he had seen so many in his line of work the possibilities are starting to blur into incomprehension.

But it isn't. He knows that now.

It's coffee. He remembers it from the low-grade percolator from that coffee shop he had invited Danny to a week ago. It's the same brand, the same scent even.

Relief floods his system so strongly he collapses into himself, his hands pulled up to his face, his knees inches away from his heaving chest. And all Steve can think of is that it's just Danny, it's just Danny, it's just Danny over and over again.

"It's just Danny." He whispers to himself, shivering from the cold as if he never left the freezing waters of the shores outside their motel. It becomes a mantra - on his lips, on his head, going on and on until finally it makes its way onto his pulse. He says his name so many times Steve feels embarrassed at the idea that at any moment any one of his team mates could come in through the front door and see him wasted and out of it, with none other but the super haole's name on his lips.

He doesn't care though. Or more accurately, Steve can't begin to distance himself away from the what's happening to him to be even aware that he should probably start wondering why he's acting like this. All he knows is that it's working, his heart is slowing, his breaths are coming back and that's all the reason he needs to keep on going.

When he finally recovers, he peels himself off the wall, the hard exterior of his ever present training back in place. He doesn't start asking questions right away. At the moment, it's nothing but an isolated panic attack.

After all, why should he find anything about this out of place?

It's just Danny.

 

V.

 _"On my own castaway_  
_Trapped and caught in between_  
_Darkened skies, tidal waves_  
_But I am moving on."_  
_Franco - Castaway_

The motel is a bad idea, Chin and Kono tell Steve about one o'clock in the morning when after not meeting up for an entire week the two of them decide to drop in on him unexpectedly - it's Steve, they reason out; the cousins have known for a long time that their boss rarely ever goes to sleep at an hour befitting human standards whenever they're tackling cases as controversial as this. They find Steve just past the door to the kitchen, doing upside down pull-ups on a thick wooden beam that looks as if it had just been recently installed.

Chin eyes the contraption with an almost lazy look before turning to Steve's heaving form, his entire body glistening with sweat. Everytime he pulls himself up he looses a guttural breath, and from the way he sounds and looks like Chin is ready to bet the contents of his safety deposit box along with the remainder of this years' pay that Steve is in complete agony.

Kono whistles appreciatively at the sight of her boss stripped to the waist, hanging upside- down with rivulets of sweat coating his body. Steve's eyes are closed but at the sound of Kono catcalling they snap open and all at once Steve's legs unfasten from the bar and he ends up sprawling down on the floor with a wet sound.

They're all concern of course - helping him up, getting him a towel, fixing him a cup of coffee (because really, there's no point in convincing Steve to consider the idea of sleeping when he's this wired on solving a case). The two of them manhandle the six foot tall monolith of flesh and bone between them unto a chair.

"Are you insane?" Kono clicks her tongue disapprovingly, kneeling down the better to scrub at the sweat on Steve's face. "You could have gotten pneumonia this way boss and you should know by now that pneumonia kills people - pneumonia's a no-no for surfers, pepe."

"Kono, stop talking about pneumonia." Steve tries to snap at her but all he gets out is an agonized groan. Pain and fatigue is causing Steve's well-polished exterior to crack - it's obvious when his very words have him clutching a stitch at his side at this, and normally McGarett is very, very much against showing and/or expressing pain, especially when his team-mates are around (probably out of some very outdated concept of masculinity - that or he's just being a stubborn ass).

"What were you thinking Steve?" Chin asks quietly. The man looks distracted about something but his eyes focus in on Chin as soon he starts talking.

"Skipping HQ, spending all your time at that motel with that witness and the Jersey detective, now this exercise in machismo - you've got to admit, even for you brah this is questionable behaviour."

"It isn't," Steve supplies without missing a beat, even though he's breathless from exertion, "questionable behaviour, I mean. It's physical therapy."

"Brah you don't need physical therapy - what you need is just plain old therapy."

Steve barks out a short, cruel laugh though he ends up wheezing right by the end of it. Kono looks at Chin with a small measure of concern, their thoughts alike in their assessment. With a meaningful look from the older man, Kono excuses herself by manner of asking for the whereabouts of Steve's bathroom.

It's the flimsiest excuse ever considering how many times the woman had "accidentally" walked-in on her boss showering before, but Steve conveniently fails to comment on this - either because he's too tired to notice the slip, too out of breath to verbalize a remark, or too used to the cousins' way of thinking to know what's exactly going on.

As soon as Kono's feet are out of sight on the ascending flight, Chin rounds in on Steve.

"Steve? What's really going on here?"

In answer, their fearless leader just stares at him.

The resounding surf outside has never been quiet considering just how close the McGarett household is to the sea, but never has it been this deafening until now with Steve crumpled on his father's kitchen floor, eyes blind even to his partners' familiar faces.

Because he doesn't see them. Steve can't see any of them past the montage of what he remembers the last few days, and to make matters worse he can't- he doesn't understand anything about it. He can't make heads or tails of it, can't extrapolate a logical explanation - let alone a conclusion - from the endlessly fraying train of his thoughts of the past week. And he can't even bear to say it out loud, to confess of it to Chin Ho Kelly, one of his closest friends and confidant ever since he stepped foot into high school.

How can he if he can't even acknowledge it in the first place?

"Steve, we're worried about you, this isn't like you at all - you only get like this on cases concerning Hesse, Wo Fat, or your mother and father's murder - and this case has nothing to do with them. What's gotten into you?"

"Painful." Steve says, breath hitching. One hand flat on his stomach, Steve's groan is audible throughout the house. Chin bends down closer to Steve though more out of impulse than any actual way of helping.

"Goddamn it I've never worked myself this hard before, not since I was still a lifer back in one of the Navy's battleships."

Chin slings Steve's arm over his shoulders before pulling himself up. His smile is patient and indulgent, like that of a father capitulating to a child's more willful decisions. He deposits him back on the chair he'd slipped from before bounding for the upstairs bedroom where he finds Kono looking around their team leader's dresser with a look of anxiety bordering on abject fear.

She spots Chin just as he goes into the room and asks, "So what? Did you ask what was wrong about him?"

Chin heads for the cabinet and pulls a shirt or two, boxers as well as a pair of cargo pants from Steve's inexhaustible collection of military fatigues. Kono looks at him inquiringly, both for the unanswered question and the clothes he has on hand and Chin just gives her a weary look.

"I did. But thing is, I'm not sure even McGarett knows what's wrong with himself."

The two of them head back down to find Steve unsurprisingly conked out. Though they know he's going to hate them for it, Chin and Kono manage to drag him outside to where Chin's motorbike is waiting. Chin, not knowing Steve's home security password decides to reprogram it on the spot. He could have asked Steve for the password but quickly dismissed the idea since Steve, even in his current sleep-deprived and physically-abused state, would have still found their efforts to get him to the hospital unacceptable.

It takes him five minutes max (he foregoes the testing at the sight of Kono having a hell of a time propping their boss up against the Harley), after which they drive straight for the Kaiser Foundation Hospital.

Later, when they've successfully managed to get Steven horizontal on a cot, he digs out his phone.

"What're you doing with the boss' cel?" Kono asks from one side of McGarett's bed. Chin doesn't know either, but one's thing for sure - you don't get far enough in the line of detective work without listening to your instincts, and right now his instincts are propelling him further in to God knows where Steve's wits had abounded to.

Sure enough, he finds one Daniel Williams in his phonebook. Hoping whatever they have going on between them wouldn't lead to the other man hanging up on the phone call on sight, Chin dials his number and hopes to God the other man answers.

Because if Steve has fallen far enough from him that answers are no longer forthcoming, he might as well start asking the one man who could possibly provide him with explanations apart from him.

Two beeps. Three beeps. Four. Five. Suddenly a voice breaks through the static,

"Hello?"

* * * * * *

After Chin's over-the-phone summation of events, the first words out of Danny's mouth are, "Just how fucking stupid is this guy really?"

Granted nobody else heard, except for Chin of course whose only response to the detective's outburst at 2:00 in the morning was to assume the studious sort of silence that could've only been maintained by keeping one's mouth forcibly shut together.

"So why the call?" Danny said, rubbing at his eyes with his knuckles, his accent thicker now than a lather of concrete and baking soda thanks to compounded sleep deprivation, "Have you and your cousin finally decided to put down the neanderthal like I suggested? Because if you are, good for you, but to reiterate myself - _I don't care_  - call me back when it's tomorrow."

"You sure talk a lot for somebody who just woke up," Chin observes, "have you always been this... talkative?"

"Somehow that didn't sound like you were going to say talkative." He mused.

"Regardless, the question stands, Daniel."

Danny presses his forehead flat against the plaster of the wall before him, "My God you sound just like him."

From more than three miles away, Chin Ho Kelly's face suddenly crumpled. Indignant, he burst out (but being Chin Ho Kelly, all he managed was an elevated whisper), "I _do not_  sound like McGarett."

Danny's laugh was pitying of himself, "Jesus Christ, you even have the same denial - tell me, did you pick up on his crazy or is Five-0 simply sitting on top of a Hellmouth?"

"What?"

"Never mind, I can feel you scowling all the way from here. Needless to say, Buffy references are lost on you people."

"Look," Chin interrupts forcefully before Danny could go on another one of his now legendary off-topic rants, "I didn't - that isn't what-"

An exhaled breath, "I called you because I thought you would have wanted to know that Steve was in the hospital."

Somehow, that pricked him a little. Danny rubs at his forehead, feeling the beginning of a budging migraine on his temples like a persistent drum solo. With a sigh of resignation, he looks up from his bed to survey the lonely little apartment around him. Nobody there.

Gracie wouldn't be coming to visit him for two weeks owing to an ultra-demanding school project and as per usual, Rachel's brand of logic found an innovative way to torture the living crap out of him once again. Under the guise of motherly concern, she had told both father and daughter in no uncertain means that until her project was done the two of them couldn't meet up since that way none of them would end up distracted from their work.

Which was utter bullshit by the way. What kind of project would occupy a Third Grade kid for hours and hours on end that a parent couldn't possibly help her out of? What, were they teaching Einstein's Theory of Relativity now to nine-year old kids? Unless the American Educational System has taken a course on the study of masochism, this has to be all Rachel's idea.

So no Gracie. No one to keep him company. At all.

Well - maybe except for the drawings.

It was no secret that after the fiasco at the motel (or as he called it in his head - a major meltdown of epic proportions on disproportionately shallows grounds), Danny had begun drawing more out of habit than out of work.

First, it was Hana. Then the doctor. Then the motel room, quickly followed by the surf outside, the greying skies, and just about any other possible distraction back there except for the biggest distraction of them all. Yet Danny's reluctance to draw the said distraction was the most telling factor of what it was that he was feeling.

And he didn't fucking like what he was feeling.

Finally, after a tense episode of recollection he finally told Meka of his obsessive need to draw Steven.

Steven. Not Steve. Or McGarett. Not even Lt. Commander Steven J. McGarett. Just plain old Steven. He said Steven.

Oh God he was so, so out of his depth.

Meka's conclusion wasn't helpful. Smiling to himself, he clapped his hands on each of Danny's shoulders and happily shouted, "Sounds like you have a crush on this guy!"

Danny vehemently protested against it, though more out of the fact that he was Danny Williams and he wouldn't be Danny _frickin'_ Williams without putting up at least some token protest.

But after everything was said and done, he had begun drawing.

Small furtive ones. Never Steve in his entirety.

Sometimes he drew his eyes, but the mere idea of putting into paper Steven's burning greys was so laughable at times that he often stopped sketching halfway into the drawing.

So instead he drew his smile, the one that always seemed so bright against the shadows of his face, or his hands, which were always locked like a death grip on anything he touched be it a steering wheel, a door knob, or his very own gun. He had drawn Steven so many times in so many ways in as little as the few days he had decided to abandon the motel but already he imagined that maybe - just maybe - he knew what it would feel like to run his carbon-stained fingers up and down his arms.

And with that image he was goddammit done for the night.

He got up, scattering the blankets off his fold-up sofa in his wake. He's clutching the phone in his hands so hard he imagines Chin hearing the sound of the cel's framework cracking in his grip. He tries to calm himself down with a deep breath out of instinct and is surprised midway through it that he had built himself into a frenzy over just a fucking sentence.

"Chin." He speaks into the phone, voice clipped.

"What is it?" Chin answers.

"Is McGarett awake?"

Chin's answer comes in an uncertain tone. "He is, son of a gun doesn't want to fall asleep. He's drugged out of his mind with sedatives but he's not going under."

For some reason, Danny had to ask this question. "Why?"

"What do you mean why? Danny I'm no expert on pharmacology, and my knowledge of chemistry is rudimentary at best so I have no idea why the drugs aren-"

"Not about the drugs man, I mean... is he, saying things? Asking for, I don't know, people?"

Way to leave things unspoken, Williams.

"Huh." Chin says thoughtfully. "Actually, he is, he started saying things just now."

Danny stops dead on the front door of his apartment.

"What's he saying?" Danny asks. It was literally no exaggeration to say that Danny Williams was waiting on bated breath.

Chin's voice comes in confused. "He's asking for you actually. How did you know?"

But there's no time for a reply. Danny cuts off the call and heads for the outside, barely even remembering to lock the door behind him on his way out. He takes to the car, his Camaro, gets in by the driver's seat and starts it with a rough twist on the key. Flooring the gas pedal, Danny speeds towards the hospital.

The car is beating, pulsating like a drum stretched thin enough to bursting on either side of him as he barrels through the roads. Little does he know though that the desperate pounding that he feels isn't from the car.

It's from his heart.

* * * * *

Back before his mother ever died and his father hadn't yet taken in the cynicism of a man who has nothing else left to live for, there was one thing that Steve loved to do. And of course, Steve being Steve, it meant the ocean.

Sometimes, he'd take a dinghy, ones owned by the locals he and his father had known for a long time and he'd just... let it drift.

Mary went with him sometimes. The arrangement only occurred when the two of them felt the need to exercise their right to rebellion as was usual with teenagers, but most of the time it was just Steve. Steve wanting to be alone. To be free, unmoored from destiny.

He'd lie down, back against the wooden floor, eyes cast upon the mirror of the ocean up above. Skies in infinite shades of blue; cerulean then periwinkle then cyan then blue upon deepest, darkest azure. He'd let the waves rock him to and fro, let the seas whisper its secrets until he found sleep unanchored from land and shore - the only place in the world where he actually found peace.

This particular instance though wasn't a memory though. It was a dream.

He could feel the seawater on his skin, preciously cool and sticky in the way that you'd never really mind. His hair was stiff with salt, and his skin rippled with gooseflesh with every gentle, soothing breeze. He was happy here. Happy like he had never been in life ever since childhood. It almost seemed unfair what came next.

The dream changed with an echo upon the winds. The drifting breeze suddenly whipped itself into a frenzy, and just as he opened his eyes heavy rain fell down upon him. Instantly, he was soaked right down into the bone. He tried to raise an arm against the stinging and the lashing and the freezing winds and waters. The skies had gone dark. Where there was peace now there was fury.

And then.

_'Whatever this people want Steve, don't you give it to them.'_

_'My brother's dead, isn't he? ISN'T HE?'_

_'I love you Steve. I'm sorry I never got to say it more often.'_

_Like thunder, there came the sound of a gun being cocked._

_'...well, so's your father then.'_

"NO!" Steve roars, almost lifting himself off the bed in half-remembered rage. Just as he snaps forward, strong hands - maybe the strongest hands he'd ever felt on him - press down unto his sides and gently forces him downward.

"Woah woah woah woah, easy there big fella, only got one orderly in the room."

Steve's breath feels frozen in his throat, as if some part of the storm in his dream had found a way to suffuse him in real life. His eyes wouldn't- couldn't - focus. Finally, through the blur in his vision, he saw the stranger's hands settle back on his arms slowly, tentatively, and they were so warm, so real, Steve could not stop himself from sliding his hands closer to his until his fingers wrapped around the man's wrists, interlocking like handcuffs.

From out past the fog of his narcoleptic daze he heard the man chuckle fondly, "What'd you do to get this cold? Did you go skinny-dipping somewhere at one in the morning? Actually, don't answer that. Knowing you that's very much of a possibility."

Danny? Was that him?

Said man looks up at him suddenly. Oh wait, he said his name out loud. Danny's expression turns half-amused, half-irritated.

"Oh wow you're slurring."

"I'm not slurring." Steve snaps at him. But as it turns out, he IS slurring - it was either that or he had just managed to start speaking in Huttese.

"Oh yes you are you goofball because last time I checked my nickname around these parts wasn't Johnny. Now get on your back or I'm going to find one of those remote control thingies that control these beds and I'm going to make it bend you like a pretzel."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Steve half-says, half-swallows the words.

Thankfully, he sounded like Jabba the Hutt at the moment so Danny was spared from hearing the innuendo. (Granted, if he had heard it would've been VERY awkward.)

"Babe, I have no idea what you just said."

Somehow he started giggling over the fact that he had called Danny 'Johnny'.

"Has anybody ever told you," he starts, still unable to enunciate a word for the life of him, "that you look just like that cartoon guy with the... with the..."

"Cartoon guy?"

"You know," said Steve, vaguely irritated, "the one with the broad shoulders and the blonde pomp-pomba- something... the one who's always wearing those shades and, and..."

Danny's only response is to quirk an eyebrow. "I'm surprised a guy your age who by the way does not even have a kid knows who the hell Johnny Bravo is."

Steve scowls at him, visually affronted. "Of course I know who he is. Who doesn't know Johnny Bravo? He's the guy that sounds like Elvis. I used to catch him back when I was still stationed in..."

And at this he stops all of a sudden.

He looks up, eyes failing to acclimate despite the soft, muted light of the hospital room. He has the cloudiest sense of recollection that every muscle of his body should be aching like a motherfucker right now but there's barely even an echo of it. Must be the drugs.

So he's half blind from the lighting and he's body is as dead as an anchor dropped out at sea, but he fails to notice all of this when he finally homes in on Detective Danny Williams looking at him expectantly, and it's only then that the full weight of the man's presence finally hits him.

"Danny?" Steve asks, and he can't help but take note of the almost painful disbelief he hears in his voice.

"Hey, looks like Hoss here finally remembers my name." The blonde man says, grinning. The sight of it sends a frisson of cool pleasure up and down the base of Steve's spine and he can't help but answer it back with one of his own.

"Babe, let me just go on the record here by saying that you are officially the craziest sane person I have ever met in my entire life."

"Thank you Danny," Steve answers with a drunken grin on his face, "and let me just say that I am far too drugged to take offense to that."

The man gets up to check on something by the side of his bed. Steve tries to turn his head in that direction and finds that he can't. Not because of pain or some obstruction, he just physically _can't_.

"At least you're starting to sound like an honest-to-God human being. Half a minute ago you were speaking like a retard."

"Danny why are you here?" Steve asks. His inhibitions are at an all-time low right now and he's afraid some half-formed concept in the back of his mind might get the better of him at this instant. He tries to shake off the drug-induced haze, knows that to be an impossibility but tries anyway because he has to know, alright? He has to know.

Somewhere inside him is something warm and painful - like a heated dagger lodged through the ribcage. The warm thing beats, pulsates - God there's no word in the English language or any other language for that matter that could possibly sum up the way this warm thing makes him feel whenever Danny's name gets mentioned - but it's there. It's there and for all he knows it might be there to stay for a very, very long time.

He tries hard to fight against the numbness and the comfortable stupor of his thoughts but it only rouses the headache he had before. Thankfully, that question is the only thing he's able to get out.

Danny comes back in his line of vision just as it starts to blacken at the edges - the pain from his sorely abused body starting to seep through the anaesthetic. He doesn't look at him too harshly at the question but his features do harden infinitesimally.

He lays down something - a shape of indeterminate something (he can't think of the word in his predicament, oh God) - before reaching for his feet with one hand.

"Chin called me." Danny says matter-of-factly. "He says he has reason to believe that you'd want me to be here."

"But does that mean... that you want to be here?" Steve asks.

Danny's breath leaves him.

* * * * *

And it doesn't feel like it's ever coming back till kingdom come.

By some miracle, Steve isn't wearing a hospital gown - which shouldn't be so surprising, Danny thinks, mentally slapping himself in the face. The reason why he's being interned here is so stupid, so superlatively so, that it barely even qualifies for hospitalization - or at least that was true back in Newark. (Hawaii doesn't seem to hold the same standards of rationale that he would expect from any other acknowledged state of the U.S. of A.)

He's wearing a faded dark green shirt which seems to hang loosely on him unlike the rest of his ill-advised wardrobe. (Stupid muscle shirts.) With it on, he actually looks like an honest-to-God human being, a far cry from his usual appearance of debauchery.

The shirt looks impossibly warm and worn - with patches of the fabric having faded into some sort of misty white color and tiny little holes dotting the sleeves and his sides.

It's unexpected. Danny is looking at Steve as if he's just managed to water down the dark edges of a painting. Like turpentine to oil, like sunlight and still water, everything is clearing up - and Danny? Danny can finally see the problem here.

Steve's look is everything Danny feels right now. Questioning, denying, and hoping - so, so much of hoping that it's bound to burst the same way that light and heat from a filament can shatter glass.

Warmth curls around his fingers and Danny is vaguely aware that it's him grasping at bare skin - at bone and blood and flesh - at Steve's delicate veins curving like flourishes of ink against his ankles.

Why is everything so painful when it comes to this man?

When his breath comes back from its eternity, Danny gets out a shaky, non-committal response even he doesn't hear, but whatever it was it seems it enough to pacify Steve. A fleeting smile chases through his features before he allows himself to sink back down against his pillow.

Steve laughs, "This case is killing me."

Danny can't help but laugh along with him as well, and because he's Danny freaking Williams he also can't help getting one last jab in even though Steve is well on his way back into unconsciousness.

"If you ask me, I don't think it's killing you fast enough McGarett." Danny murmurs the words, a small, urgent smile never leaving his lips. Even as Steve's breaths even out, his hands never unfasten from its grip.

 

VI.

 _"Speak explosive speech, speech to keep us safe_  
_A smiling fire bomb."_  
_Stateless - This Language_

It's funny how those warm and fuzzy moments can quickly disintegrate in the wake of a 5-0 investigation. Acting upon the information they had gotten from Jenna's highly controversial sources (i.e. the Pentagon), 5-0 had deployed a small perimeter around a plain, whitewashed house in the suburbs. It was to be a quiet mission - a stealth job whose parameters involved either the silent apprehension of their suspect or simple surveillance from afar.

Or that was the way the mission was intended to go, anyhow.

The night was warm, humid, and vaguely suffocating - the sound of a storm rumbling amidst the noise of Oahu’s traffic apparent even all the way from this cozy spot of the island. The sound was driving Steve's teeth on edge, the constant elevation of his heartbeat forcing him to slow down and assess the environment crouched down upon the grass, desperately listening in on the others' from his headset.

It was all Steve could do to keep himself from rushing headlong into the fray. 5-0 had split up, as per their usual strategy of flushing out the lone perp - problem was the lone perp wasn't so lonely afterall. Bellcroft was very much a paranoid bastard.

A serial poisoner turned mob assassin with special ties to Wo Fat, Marcus Bellcroft was a plain faced man with a personality the force of a neodymium magnet. Nothing about him was imposing, strong, or noteworthy in any way - except that right now, with a small army seemingly mobilized from nowhere, Marcus Bellcroft might as well have been Hitler or Nero reincarnate.

When you're on the opposite end of a line and all you hear is gunfire and the panicked breathing of friends and colleagues you might never get to see past the evening, you start considering a lot of things.

Things that sane people do not normally consider in the breadth of one lifetime.

Steve knows Danny likes to play it up as if he's fucking Rambo - 'never gets hit by a freaking bullet, that man!' - and he knows Danny half expects him to survive every single firefight intact save for a couple of scrapes or gashes like some kind of militant cockroach.

But the only reason why he lives is because he's cautious, he's vigilant, and he's smart enough to know that concrete does not equate bulletproofing; and unlike Rambo not once has Steve ever considered walking into a building and just go guns ablazing because no - ballistic invulnerability is not A THING when it comes to Navy SEALS (or any other branch of the military in any country in the world.)

It says volumes about his current mental state though that all he can think about right now is wading into the middle of that exchange and just start shooting the hell out of every man waving a gun who doesn't sport a blue coat or a tactical vest - or an overly gelled set of blonde hair.

Goddammit, he should be out there! He should be risking his life and limb like any other cop worth his money, not hiding around in the foliage beside some road waiting for word of his teammates predicament!

Furious, he pulls himself off the ground in one sinuous movement, races across the darkness half-crouched with one hand wrapped around his PT92 and the other one holding an unlit flashlight.

Apoplectic noises - more gunshots being fired - carry from the East. Steve eases himself back into his training, cold blood coursing through his veins.

He makes his way down the steps of a nondescript building in an unoccupied lot, his plan being getting access out unto the balcony in the hopes of jumping ledge to ledge until he gets to Bellcroft's hideyhole.

He's not even done busting down the door when suddenly a voice comes alive in his headset and he's treated to a relentless torrent of profanity that can only come from one irate Williams.

"...ing Hell, stop SHOOTING! You're getting plaster and tile all over my last good shirt, goddammit!"

"Danny, are you okay?" Steve says instantly. One last shoulder check against the door and he barrels through with a loud crack - wood splintering off as the entire panel of wood flies entirely off its hinges.

Steve collapses in force, gets back up quickly despite the obvious knowledge that he's strained an entire arm from shoulder to wrist before walking up the stairs. He's in so much pain that all he can do to support himself is to press an entire side of his body against the wooden balustrade.

Danny's response is harried, not to mention out of breath from having to quip repeated abuses against the people shooting at him.

" _OKAY?_ " Danny screams through the radio-set.

Despite the apparent life-or-death situation the entire lot of them have found themselves in, Steve can't help picture a livid Danny waving around a pistol and making threatening hand gestures to a disentangled ear bud.

"Steven, I am _not okay_. I am warning you now -if I die from this - if I die and they take my body to the morgue and my family sees me all riddled with bullet holes like a life-sized figuring made of Swiss Cheese, I am going to _fucking_  kill you-"

"Listen Danny - stop for a moment will you? - I need you to listen-"

"-no, I will not listen. _You_  will _listen_. If I get grazed by one more bullet starting now until the time that you get here I swear I am going to strangle you with your own dog tags - I mean it Steven, Jesus Christ I haven't even been paid yet for my services-"

"Danny, get a grip! Why don't you stop threatening me for a second so you can start giving me your coordinates instead?"

There's an unpleasant pause on the other end of the line.

"Coordinates? _REALLY_?" Danny says viciously.

"I think you might have mistaken me for my car, Steven, but let me just get this out there, okay? - _I DO NOT COME WITH BUILT-IN GPS_. Why do you Marines always have to overcomplicate things? (SEAL, thinks Steve, mentally butting in.) Why don't you just say something along the lines of 'Hey - I need you to start rifling out some addresses buddy' instead of all this coordinates crap, huh? Is that too much to ask? Is that too much to expect from you, Steven? Would you like me to reach into this phone and strangle you with your dog tags now?"

And it goes on and on and on. For somebody who's been panting and screaming and breathing in smoke and plaster dust for the last thirty minutes, Steve can't believe the man still has enough breath to go on a screaming tirade of these proportions.

He really should be telling Danny to keep quiet though - Bellcroft's mercenaries may be stupid, but it still doesn't take a lot of effort to shoot a hidden target - especially if that target comes with a mouth like Danny's. He can't bring himself to tell Danny to shut up though.

For one thing, Danny's screaming is the only thing that's keeping his pulse level as of this moment. But more importantly, it's the noises he's making now - Danny swearing, his ragged breaths, the sound of his semi-automatic squeezing one wild bullet after another - that tells Steve that despite everything his partner is still alive.

His arms busted. Steve knows he'll have a hell of a time jumping from balcony to balcony now that his arm is in this condition - so instead he improvises.

Somehow he gets himself on the roof. The tiles are wet from humidity as he pulls himself over with one arm on the edge and a leg to push him up from the deck. The night is dark enough to swallow silhouettes whole and the power's gone out - probably a bullet's torn through a transformer.

His footsteps light against the slick slate, Steve pulls out a flashlight and begins traversing the network of interspersed rooftops until he finds himself on a building that's practically shaking from gunfire.

"Danny, listen," Steve breathes, praying that the man hasn't managed to run out of bullets despite his reckless shooting, "I need you to tell me where you are right now - I'm on the east side of the neighborhood on the roof of a two-story building - dammit, I can't identify the paint, it's too dark - are there still people shooting at you?"

There's no response but he can hear Danny breathing, the sound of his voice hitching every time there's gunfire. He can vaguely hear bits and pieces of a conversation - Danny's voice neither one of the two people talking.

There's the characteristic crackle of an ear bud being put back on and then,

"Steve - there's four of them." For once, Danny's voice is dead serious as he speaks.

"Four hostiles in your building, gotcha-"

"No." Danny responds quickly. Too quickly. Almost like he's straining to hear something just out of range of being audible and quickly relaying it back.

"No Steve that's not what I mean. Bellcroft - I'm in the same building as him - I think I just heard him say that he's not the only one who pulled the hits. I - I can't listen in on anything he's saying any more than that. Steve-"

"Alright Danny, stay put. Are you safe there?"

"I am. They think I'm dead just because I stopped shouting at them for one second. Ha. Amateurs. If I didn't think I'd actually die from it I'd be laughing right now."

"Stop being so morbid, will you?" Steve cuts in. "You can start with your usual doom and gloom once you're finally out of there."

"I'm not being morbid! Steve, listen, I am currently locked in a bathroom that's clearly way too expensive for me and my blood - and speaking of my blood, it's currently decorating the floor tiles, the bathroom mirror, the curtains, and oh - look! I've just finished painting my third bath towel red with it so forgive me for thinking this but I really think I'm dying-"

Suppressing the sudden, all-too real choking feeling in his throat, Steve gets out a firm "Stay put" before maneuvering himself inside a window. He doesn't think about how he does it - one second he's on the roof, the next second he's managed to pull himself up from a roll in one fluid movement, one hand fastened on his pistol.

He has his Taurus leveled and his fingers squeezing off a round before the feeling of vertigo even subsists. The bullet drops an armed man just as he turns around - he falls down just as quickly as the glass raining behind him.

Inching his way across the room, Steve's every step is careful on the floor. He moves like a ghost. He checks the hallway quickly, intensely aware of every sound he's making.

It comes to him like an electric buzz; all at once he can feel every muscle in his body as it moves, his heartbeat fills his ears and it drowns out the pain in his arm and the aching in his chest. He feels like he's lost at sea, with nothing but the metal shape of his gun grasped tightly in his hands to guide him to the shore.

He moves deliberately down the halls, no longer bothering to cover up the noise made by his foot falls.

The first man to slinker into view - a dark shape visible only by the moonlight streaming from the open window behind him - stops dead in his tracks as he looks down the corridor. It's completely dark and the last thing he sees as the Navy SEAL brings up his pistol into his sights is the phosphorescent flash of fire from its nozzle.

The man falls. A second man cries out from the corner, just behind the man Steve had just shot. He points the gun at Steve - the shot goes wild as he bats it away with an arm. He throws a panicked jab in retaliation but he's up against the light and Steve is covered in darkness.

Nothing connects - Steve thrusts his fist squarely into the man's solar plexus, feels him go boneless from the blow. He grabs one of the man's flailing arms, flings him bodily against the wall just behind him and then proceeds to fire a bullet in his direction without bothering to look. The man lets out a gurgling cry reassuringly and Steve knows he's dead.

He takes to the stairs slowly. He can't afford to reveal his location because he ended up taking a step into empty air.

On the landing, he feels rather than senses people ahead of him. Like a warm breath on exposed flesh.

He stays every instinct in his body though to just start shooting in that direction because that's how you end up killing off your own people. Instead, Steve crouches low, taking short, controlled breaths to make sure he's indiscernible from the patch of shadows he's currently hiding in.

There's a crash, the sound of somebody knocking something over - probably a chair. Steve hears a softly spoken curse followed by a burst of static from what must be a defunct transceiver on the table - and it surprises him momentarily when it comes to him that, from the voice he just heard, one of the people in this room must be a woman.

"Who the fuck are these people?!" The girl hisses.

An older man, his voice like an oil spill, answers her. "They're the Governor's men - the ones the Director warned us about."

"Oh yeah?" She snorts, "This isn't funny Russo. Whoever the fuck these people are, they're killing off way too many of mine. It was a mistake associating ourselves with that lunatic - I don't care if he decides to raise the fucking pay by another half million - the Mors can take that money and burn it to ashes for all I care. I say we're done protecting Bellcroft and his allies."

Steve hears the sound of a gun being cocked, and for a second a primal surge of fear sends his heart rocketing in his chest. He spins around, half-expecting the cold barrel of a pistol aimed at the back of his head - but he's wrong.

From behind him, he hears the older man say something.

"I knew you'd say that, Kanai."

"Russo?"

Spinning back around, Steve fires a shot almost at the same time the man called Russo fired his own. Steve hasn't managed to take his finger off the trigger yet, but already he knows he's miscalculated.

"The bloody hell was that-?"

Russo's voice.

A flash of light. Noise like a thunderclap. Steve drops to the floor as something hits him on his vest with the force of a hammer blow. It leaves him breathless, the impact all blunt pain and white in his vision.

But if it's any consolation, he knows Russo is down too. They both fired their second shots at the same time, but Steve saw the flash from Russo's gun and he did not - that split second illumination was all Steve needed to draw a bead on the man's chest, and from the sounds he's making now, he's pretty sure the man's on his way to the grave.

He's floored though. The bullet has left him flat on his back and unable to get up.

"Steve?"

"Danny." He answers.

"Steve - thank God - I heard the shot, clear as day, right through my headset. Are you okay man?"

"I really should be the one asking that question."

"Don't pull that on me Steve. Just - don't, okay? Not now. Did you get shot? Is it bad? Are you bleeding out?"

"I have a vest on, Detective Williams. I'm perfectly fine. I'm just in PAIN, alright?"

"Alright, alright." A pause. "Actually, this _isn't alright_."

Steve feels a burgeoning sigh escape past his lips. He should have expected this of Danny. For all the man's goddamn charm, he can be so exasperating.

"What do you mean?" He says, finally pulling himself upright.

" _THIS_." Danny stutters out. There's something in his voice - an unknown quality that Steve is in some way familiar with, something he should know from his own experiences, but whatever it is it's currently lost in translation.

Still. It's such a rare occasion for the blonde man to stutter though that hearing him now blows away the iron in his blood. Steve feels disconnected, but it takes him no time at all to remember that Danny... Danny's bleeding out as surely as he's speaking right now.

It propels him to get up on his feet despite the resounding chorus of aches and pains all over his body. Danny doesn't elaborate what THIS means but Steve has taken the following silence for the worst possible outcome. With a finger pushed up against the bud in his ear, Steve fiddles with the commlink until he finally homes in on Chin's voice.

He hears him just as he finishes issuing orders to storm the vicinity of a compromised property when Steve cuts in hurriedly with a curt, "Chin, it's me."

"McGarett? Thank god, that's one more member of 5-0 accounted for. Where are you?"

"No time for that - listen. I need you and your men to spread out - check all surrounding houses on your six - backtrack if you have to - but it's important that you find Detective Williams as soon as possible."

"Steve," Chin interjects, his voice chiding, "we need to stick to the plan - the only reason why this entire operation isn't falling apart is because we're taking down Bellcroft's nests one at a time. Kono has the other half of the SWAT team backing her up and I can't risk splitting more of my reinforcements to look for the Jersey cop."

"It's Danny, Chin. That's his name and he's dying as we speak." Steve presses. He's never addressed Chin this way - never spoken to him feeling like he's so close to cracking open like an egg. It must be a shock for Chin to hear him speak like this - like he's out of fucking breath and at the same time so full to bursting with it he can't even get the words past the obstruction in his throat.

Still he tries, he tries so much he knows the only thing that can be heard throughout the intercom right now - for the entire taskforce to hear moreover - is this utter, uncharacteristic, wheedling bullshit - his bullshit, and he's practically falling apart, stumbling on his own metaphorical feet as he gets the words out one by one like a fucking puzzle in reverse, and he can't stop getting it out - getting it all the fuck out - because it's Danny.

Oh god, it's Danny.

And he needs him. And he can't even decipher half the reasons why he feels this wanting and needing so strongly - but all he knows as of this moment is that if he somehow loses Danny to this fucked-up mess he didn't mean to engineer, then he'll never find out exactly why he NEEDS and why he WANTS. And Jesus fucking Christ he doesn't want that. Not ever.

"...please just," he catches himself, "I need you to look for him - he says Bellcroft is where he's hiding at and he's bleeding and he isn't responding anymore but the feed from his location hasn't gone dead and I'm - I don't know what to do about this-"

"Steve," Chin interjects once again, but this time his voice is seriously alarmed, "bruda, calm down. We'll find him, I promise you, but you - this isn't you - this isn't like anything you've ever been before and it's seriously starting to scare the living daylights out of me. Guide me through what happened, okay?"

And Steve does. Haltingly. All the while he's running through the dark, checking for more signs of hostility.

He's a mess. He can't bear to assess himself anymore. And he's afraid that if he takes one more hard look on himself, the realization he knows that's dawning on him, the one he's been fighting off so hard in his subconscious for the last few days might just up and spill over.

But then again, maybe it'd be better if that happened. Maybe then he'd finally have no excuses any more.

* * * * *

Okay, so lesson Number 41 - never doze off on a panicked McGarett.

He remembers saying something along the territorial lines of _I-Desperately-Need-To-Get-This-Off-My-Chest_ and _I-Desperately-Need-To-Shut-The-Fuck-Up-Right-Now_ before blacking out completely. Judging by that abrupt end to his and Steve's conversation, Danny would say that his mind had gone with the latter destination. He's never been happier with being rendered unconscious until now.

He's on the floor, he can't feel his legs, there's a pinprick of heat unfolding against the side of his stomach that feels like the fucking Sun is burning right through it, and the tiles underneath him are wet, cold, and sticky - his slacks (there goes every sanitary thing in his closet) wet with water, blood, sweat, and piss if the slight scent of ammonia in the air is any indication.

That's the last straw.

If not for his slacks being ruined, his situation right now could still have been salvageable. But as of right now, with everything that's happened especially with his slacks being soaked with his own piss, Danny can safely say that this is the farthest he's ever been in the uncharted waters of the Gloriously Fucked.

He tries to move his upper torso - see just how mobile and in control of his facilities he is - and is instantly floored by the sensation of his abdomen clenching against the small, metal pellet currently embedded inside him.

The pain leaves him stunned and breathless. It also makes him feel like puking. And he does. On his shirt. Repetitively.

Goddamn it.

On top of it all his vision's going to hell and his limbs feel like vegetables. All the same though, he manages to pat himself down to check whether or not he's bleeding out from his wound.

Danny is pleasantly surprised to find a couple of bloody towels pressed against his agony. His tie - Grace's tie - has been used to hold the towels in place against his stomach, and for some reason that comforts him.

It doesn't make the pain any less but he finds it vaguely poignant that the cheap, mortifying duck-coloured tie his daughter once bought for him back when she was just three years old (and could only talk about becoming a vet) was now the one thing keeping him here.

Even now, Grace anchored him to life.

It was funny that he couldn't even remember binding his wounds and yet here he was with Grace's tie around him. Must've been instinct that told him to do so.

He's in the bathroom, the lights are out, and he can only manage to see because a dead grunt's flashlight had fallen, the beam slipping through the crack underneath the door.

What was going to become of him now?

Sure, he could probably survive for maybe an hour or two at most thanks to his make-shift tourniquet but no amount of hope or sentiment was going to save him from Belcroft's men when they finally tear through the door.

The realization of that makes him break out in cold sweat, which is saying something since he's been cold ever since he woke up. This is the coldest he's ever been in his life; the cold is so deep and pervasive that it begins to burn, so that he can no longer tell apart the burning of his bullet wounds and the heavy, numbing pain of bleeding out.

It just feels so GODDAMN painful. Everything is burning and freezing and painful and aching - he's dying he knows it and oh God Grace, I'm so sorry, I'msorry sorry sorry, fucking hell, oh God-

He's sobbing and laughing. Danny should keep quiet but he can't stop himself from feeling and sounding like an injured animal any more than he can stop himself from hoping that the next man coming through that door wouldn't be any of Belcroft's men, come to kill him with a single bullet to the head.

He finds himself hoping - and he hates himself for even thinking about hoping for it because it makes him weak, what this man does, and by God is he never going to accept the fact that that man makes him weak - but he can't help hope that maybe the next man to come through that door would be no one else but Steve McGarett, come to save him because nobody else in this goddamn island could possibly save him now.

Steven, he thinks. And against the darkness of his eyelids, unbidden his imagination explodes into being.

Eyes like grey fire. Shadows like ink flourishes. Salt in his hair and sand on his skin. Water and warmth. Steel bullets and soft flesh.

It makes him weak, Danny thinks to himself as he unknowingly holds up his SIG P245 to the door, ready for anyone and anything to come crashing through. Instead - memories, images, these - these cravings. All of it.

They're what passes through.

Grace and Steven. Steven and Grace. He was wrong when he thought his little girl was his only anchor to the world.

Jaws clenched, life draining out of him, Danny finally thinks the words that he fears is true but can no longer deny with everything now as it is.

That Steve McGarett makes him weak.

Because he loves him.

And Danny knows - like his Pa had insisted years before and till now he'd never believed - that nothing else in the world can bring a man to his knees than these words.

He's being torn from the bindings, thrust blindly out to sea, and he's falling though falling is the most insufficient word in the universe as of this moment.

He's careening, plummeting, and somehow he's landing and picking himself up all at the same time as that goddamn falling falling falling.

And it appears on his lips.

" _Goddamn you_ , Steven." Danny whimpers to himself. "You better get me out of this mess because I am fucking in love with you."

He fully intends to stop at 'Steven' - but his heart is a foolish thing and like his mouth it hammers on, and when he gets the rest of the words out Danny just about laughs because if he could have chosen the where and how of this dying declaration of amorous stupidity, this is still the way he would have wanted it to go.

Tired and bleeding, with plaster on his fucking hair and piss drying the insides of his slacks; not perfect, not even close, farthest thing from it even - but it's real, it's out, and this way he'll never take it back.

The thought comforts him immensely as he breathes out into the dark room. And because he's Danny _frickin'_ Williams he can't help but add in the loudest Jersey drawl he can muster,

"And if you don't haul ass soon I will kill you - I swear to God I will find a way to - and I will kill you. I will kill you dead."

His heartbeat stutters as he speaks the words, a single note of fear in his chest as the darkness starts to press down on him.

But then the comm-link follows his lead, stuttering to life.

There's an electric buzz, a rush of static, and Danny can't believe what he's hearing.

Warmth. The warmest words in this cold, blue night.

"I hear you," Steve's voice sounds like it's being broken and made whole at the same time, "loud and clear."

There's a pause, just long enough for a panicked intake of breath.

"Sit tight, Danno. I'm coming for you."

* * * * *

Chin Ho Kelly has seen Steve grow up.

As one of the few people in the world privileged enough to see Steve change from the anxious, wounded boy he was so many years ago and into the kind of man he was now willing to follow all way to the ends of the earth, he had only this to say.

Steve has never been any more of a stranger to him as he is right now.

He knows the McGarett mindset; knows it better than anybody else in the force because he's the only one here who has had the opportunity to go at it with both father and son. It's an odd feeling, seeing John McGarett in his son - one moment he's bantering with Steve, and the next moment every hair in his body stands in attention as he readies himself for John's assessment of the case - but then he looks up and the memory of it dies in an eye blink.

Because Steve is the one giving the assessment, and he moves back and forth in front of him with the sort of ruthless grace Chin had long ago associated with his partner and mentor, John.

Father and son like cast-iron mannequins, he used to think.

They were strong, loyal, kind men who had time and time again proved to him that they were impervious to fear and invulnerable to bullets.

But they had nothing inside; hollow and dead, they were only ever truly alive during those few moments where they felt like everything they had was on the line.

But now it seemed he was wrong.

For all his father's intentions, good natured as they were, it now seemed that something of the frightened, resentful little boy in Steven was waking up.

You couldn't see it in his actions; he had his old man perfectly down to the tiniest of details and the most inconsequential of trivialities. But Chin sees it nonetheless, and this is because Chin has seen him in his weakest - seen him before he even started taking the steps that would eventually lead him to going back to this island to hunt down Hesse for his father's murder.

People see things in you even when they're no longer there, and call him crazy but Chin does see it.

Somewhere along the way, Steve's found himself a heart.

No longer just a mannequin, he muses.

But that's why he now finds him a stranger - Chin has never known Steve past insecurity, ruthlessness or that single-minded determination of his. All Chin has to understanding Steve is pain, exhaustion, and those few momentary lapses of humanity that had him convinced that that was all there'd ever be of their man, their leader.

That night though, it’s as if the universe sends him proof of the contrary on a silver platter. It comes with a burst of white noise, a static rush of electricity.

'"Goddamn you Steven."' The man's voice - Danny's voice - is breathless, but he doesn't sound like he's in pain despite the rough edges of his voice; Danny just sounds like he's been laughing for the better part of an hour.

'"You better get me out of this mess because I am fucking in love with you."'

Chin doesn't stop moving; neither does anybody else.

But Steve does. And he looks absolutely floored by the words that have just come through on every headset on every man on this god forsaken force.

Chin's eyes meet Kono's over the tide of gun-toting men rushing through the streets. She looks as taken aback as Chin although unlike her he has the decency not to show it. He gestures at her to check up on Steve and reluctantly she turns back to do so.

As it turns out, Chin needn't have worried.

McGarett pushes past him. And everybody else. He doesn't blame any of the troops for instinctively making way for Steven - because anybody with enough brain cells to rub together would see that getting in the way of the Lt. Commander now would be a very, very bad idea.

They round the corner, the men beginning to slow down. Up ahead, they catch the barest glimpse of a light on a window being hastily put out. They take short, deliberate steps across the lawn, the house before them looming ominously.

Chin gives out orders for the men to fan out and Kono, catching on to the unspoken details of the plan, breaks off from the main party accompanied by a few men of her own. All three of them, Kono included, bear heavy duty sniper rifles.

Chin Ho Kelly is so busy attending to the troops placement and making sure they take full advantage of the blackout that the idea of Steve angry and frustrated momentarily slips his mind.

It's only when Kono's nervous voice makes it through the intercom that he finally realizes that Steve is nowhere to be seen.

He swears out loud. Kono mirrors him through the radio. He casts eyes across the lawn, sees nothing, and is about to pull out a flashlight the better to see their surroundings when he remembers their exact situation and thinks better of it.

"Steve's on the loose." He tells - more like sighs - through the comms. Kono lets out a mirthless laugh, sounding every bit as defeated as himself.

"Don't worry cuz, Steve's going to pull through this I just know it."

"I wish I had your confidence in this situation, Kono, and I know Steve's been through worse scenarios than this but with the way he is right now I can't help but feel something's about to go wrong."

"Pfft, you think I feel confident about all these? You have no idea just how much I'm dying to follow Steve in there right now."

Chin shakes his head as he takes point in front of the squad.

"When we all finally get out of this alive, we really need to start talking sense into McGarett."

"Oh don't worry about that," Kono answers, just a touch of amusement in her voice, "something tells me someone in that house already has that department covered."

 

VII.

 _"It's friendly fire and sunlight_  
_The aftermath of one too many_  
_Words I said, when I should have said nothing at all."_  
_EDEN - Drowning_

The next few minutes are a complete blur to Steve.

He'd like to say he feels remorse for his actions, but he can barely remember just how many bullets he's fired or just how many bones he's broken in his drive to find Bellcroft.

While Chin's men were encircling the perimeter, Steve broke away from the main force around the same time Kono took up position with her snipers. It was easy enough to capitalize on their distraction.

Getting in though had been a completely different affair.

He had to knock out a few men guarding the side-entrance (although out of spite he had blown off a kneecap apiece from each of the men standing guard). It wasn't a wise decision seeing that he had attracted the brunt of Bellcroft's men to himself by doing so. In the end, he had to resort to skulking in and out of the rooms, dispatching men unlucky enough to stumble upon him with muffled shots.

He should leave a few of them alive - it's the decent thing to do after all. But something's infected him; it's in his blood, his veins. His heart is pumping the poison through his system and Steve can't help but relish it. He's making use of every excuse there is to exercise his nigh infinite capacity for cruelty.

He sees a man make a move for something in the dark and he shoots him down in two places at once, not bothering to check for arms. He flings people bodily up against walls or past landings, and breaks wrists with a flick of his own. He takes cover behind incapacitated men and has no issue firing bullets through them like they're goose-down pillows all for the sake of masking his gunfire.

By the time Chin's decided to storm the house, Steve's left a trail of broken, battered, bullet-ridden bodies in his wake. Most of them are dead while the unlucky few left alive wished they were, considering their conditions.

As he sneaks up the stairs, the sound of heavy boots and clipped orders being given out from below, Steve makes his way to a man in the process of radioing for further help. His back is turned towards him and he doesn't see the man coming.

Steve takes immense satisfaction from snapping his neck in two. He grabs a hold of the man's back, slides an arm across the hollow of his throat. His fingers dig in where his spine connects with skull and with a brutal twist, Steve fractures the connection between the two with a deft pull.

It doesn't go smoothly though - the man resists. The only thing he accomplishes by doing so is dying a bloody, painful death - a splinter having lodged itself unto the back of his throat. The force shreds the muscles holding his neck together; everything simply cracks and breaks.

Iron in his blood. Fire in his belly. Steve hasn't had the opportunity to do that ever since he left Baghdad.

Bellcroft is the target. Bellcroft is the enemy. His mind tells him as he moves forward.

But then he kicks down the door to a room and almost as soon as the hinges snap off, someone inside squeezes off a bullet. A streak of light breezes past, missing him - but the sudden wet heat on his left temple tells him otherwise. The pain is dull and muted, but the sudden heavy warmth he feels on his side is discomfiting. It reminds him of the time he once got a burn from a motorbike.

He should kill this man.

He should.

He levels the gun in the empty darkness, dead center where he saw the flash of light come from. From this range, he knows he's not going to miss. Grim and determined, he squeezes.

The pistol hitches, the mechanism coughing.

He's out of bullets.

From here he should move on to strangling the shooter, it's what a former Navy SEAL would have done. He doesn't though.

Partly because there's no need to do so as he hears the heavy footfalls of the HPD SWAT team moving up the staircase, and also because just as the gun clicks Steve hears a voice that stops him cold - a voice that's at once a raw gurgle and a strangled sob. It's the sound of a dying man.

When the voice finally registers, Steve just goes limp.

"Don't kill me..." He hears the man say. "Please don't..."

Steve stands stock still by the door frame, his very being frozen from the outside in.

"I have a daughter." The man gets out, "Please don't kill me..."

He hears him whimper, and somehow it's obscene. There's the sound of something heavy and metallic clatter against the ground.

The tiles are wet, slick with what Steve hopes is just water. He takes slow, cautious steps forward across the bathroom floor and he hopes to God that Danny doesn't have another weapon up his sleeve because even he can't silence the wet sounds his footfalls are making with all this water in the room.

He spots a light source in the shallows, picks it up to reveal a too-small flashlight that lets out a narrow beam of illumination.

He inches the few feet to where he had seen the flash of gunfire and kneels abruptly, his hands reaching out in the darkness. He can't bring himself to pull up the flashlight.

Steve inches further, fingers feeling through the air.

And he stops just as his digits comes into contact with wet fabric.

Danny recoils from him, and in a second a knuckle hits him on the side. It's a desperate blow, he knows, because Danny's groan of pain as he overextends his bleeding arm hurts him more than the physical impact of it. The man follows this with a weak jab, and even in the darkness Steve can tell it's a feint.

He seizes the arm just as Danny attempts to wrestle Steve's own with an armlock. He breaks free of his weak grip, training taking over, and is halfway through delivering a vicious haymaker to the face when the awareness that it's Danny before him stops him.

That's twice now that he could have killed him.

Danny flails in his grip, his voice angry and defiant as he screams out profanities and protestations. He doesn't know when he starts shaking, but it comes over him like a wave of cold.

Steve's arms fasten around Danny's neck and he trashes even more, even wilder, like an animal raging against his cage. Finally, all strength fails him and Danny collapses against his chest with a hoarse cry, his voice choking as he gets out a single word, uttered over and over again without reprieve.

There's nothing else Steve can think of except to pull the man close to him, arms encircling Danny's heaving chest, his body pressing so tightly against his as if by that simple gesture he can somehow turn himself into a human tourniquet.

He's shaking so hard that every nerve ending of his body should be unraveling like frayed thread. He doesn't know what pushes him over exactly, but when Kono and Jenna finally come in through the door with their flashlights nigh blinding in the dark, it's to see Steve impassive and staring blankly, what could easily be water streaking his face, and Danny huddled in his arms breathing meekly with only Grace's name on his lips.

  

VIII.

 _"And I found love where it wasn't supposed to be_  
_Right in front of me_  
_Talk some sense to me."_  
_Amber Run - I Found_

The details of Bellcroft's incarceration are settled quickly. Too quickly, if anybody asks.

It's been three weeks since the incident and all Steve has done in all that time is bring up more files on the scattered homicide case and to work Chin, Kono, and Jenna right to the fucking bone checking up on vague references about the "Mors."

He spends approximately eight hours a day at HQ and after that he wordlessly leaves for the door with car keys in hand. Nobody asks him where he's going - and it's not to the hospital where Danny's been interned, Chin assures, having already checked after the first few times Steve left them behind to finish up for the day.

What's interesting though is that even after all this time, Steve is still driving around Danny's Camaro like he owns it.

Kono asked him about it late one afternoon and only received the line "Clearly I'm holding on to it" delivered in the tersest of voices that, even for Steve, is a record par. It's a slap in the face, that's what it is, and after that nobody has attempted to engage Steve in conversation again.

But being worked to the bone by a sullen, ungrateful tyrant of a man leads to unsurprising consequences. When Chin finally intercepts Steve as he makes his way out one afternoon, nobody is surprised by the altercation that follows.

Kono and Jenna spring into action, breaking up the fight. Jenna comes in between them to help restrain Chin and push Steve away but it's Kono that finally snaps the other man out of his stupor. In most movies, it takes a sensible maiden to slap some sense into the disillusioned man.

But Kono has never been much of a sensible maiden (clearly the maiden part is stressing it), and the idea of her slapping anybody in the face to bring some sense to them is laughable. No, in this particular scenario, Kono latches unto one of Steve's arms and executes a perfect jiu jitsu arm bar that would have made Steve very, very proud if not for the fact that it leaves him pinned to the floor and wriggling in surprise and pain.

"Alright, alright, enough," Steve says against a face full of the welcome mat, "I know where this is going."

"Good," Kono says quietly, "because none of us are in the mood to do anything except beat some sense into you."

Steve gets up, patting dust off his shirt and cargo pants. His voice is sullen and he doesn't look at any of them when he says, "What do you want to know?"

"Start with where in the world you go to every day at this hour." Chin says.

"Hospital." Steve answers, non-plussed.

"Bull," comes Jenna's poignant response.

"House."

"Not likely," Chin manages through pursed lips.

"Beach?"

Kono shoots him a look like 'Really, Bruh?'

"Steve, just tell us." Chin says as he finally convinces Jenna that he's not going to slug McGarett (again) in the face. For what it's worth, Jenna seems to have finally gotten a handle on the sheer level of insanity that comes with working for Five-0 because she shoots him a suspicious glance - all too aware of the group's propensity for violence - but it quickly softens from the look of pleading on his face.

Steve gives them a long, hard look each. Finally, he relinquishes - Chin can tell from the way Steve's eyes loses that hard glimmer. He takes a deep breath, his knee tapping out a staccato rhythm against the linoleum floor, the car keys jangling in his fingers. It actually takes Chin aback when he realizes that Steve is nervous.

"I've..." he starts shakily, palming both of his hands in what he doesn't even know is his anxiety showing,

"...been island hopping. Looking for Wo Fat. Alone. Which, I guess, you knew already."

"What?" comes Kono and Chin's joint reply. Jenna doesn't say anything but a look of betrayal somehow comes across her features.

"Steve, what were you thinking?" Chin demands angrily, "You can't just go on a solitary manhunt for an international criminal just because things at HQ aren't looking up and up, and furthermore going up against Wo Fat with no back-up is insane! You're practically throwing your life away."

"I don't plant to," Steve grits his teeth, "throw my life away, I mean. I'm smart, I'm careful - you people already know these things about me - I just want to end him. I just want to end all these things now."

Kono shakes her head in disbelief. "Steve, be sensible. The Governor didn't give us full immunity and means all so we could start carrying out jobs like this-"

"This isn't a job, this is a mission. Call it semantics or a difference of opinion, I don't care. And anyway, none of are you going on this. I am. I _alone_. And none of you are talking me out of this."

"Really Commander?" Jenna says acidly, "Because I seem to recall you and I establishing some sort of agreement about this."

She gets right up into his face, eyes wet but her features set decidedly against the possibility of tears falling. "That was the entire point behind why I joined this task force. If you're going on a suicide trip to take out Wo Fat, I'm coming with you and you better believe it."

"Jenna," Steve glares at her, "you are unstable."

"And oh, I'm sorry - and this sudden wild change in your personality and work methods is somehow the best case anyone's ever made for a semblance of stability?"

Chin winces.

"Burn." Says Kono somewhere in the background.

"Look, I don't need your help in this-"

"-you never do."

"This is something I've got to take care of my own-"

"-I have just as much of a right to go chasing after him as you do."

"This isn't about anybody's rights-"

"-yes it is, otherwise you'd let me in on this."

"For Christ's sake Jenna, you can't help me on this because you're not even a field agent!"

"Steve!" Chin yells. The man freezes. So do the others, and for good reason.

Chin never screams.

Steve's been working with Chin and Kono for the better part of nearly a year, and if there's one thing he knows about his partner, it's that Chin is a nice guy. But nice guys do not necessarily equate to being saints.

For a moment, all three of them stare at him. Chin makes use of this time to pry Jenna's grip off the collar of Steve's shirt, and with surprising strength he pulls aside the bigger man and together they head back behind the double doors of the main office.

"Look Chin, I'm fine-"

Chin holds up a hand for silence.

He paces around for a minute, unsure of what to say. Steve fixes him a stern glance, arms tucked beneath his elbows, and Chin recognizes it as the look Steve's old man used to fix him back when he was still a greenhorn with an all too nervous trigger-finger. The memory of it makes him smile and all of a sudden he realizes that by all rights this conversation should be easier than it's supposed to be.

He takes one more calming breath. When he no longer feels like following Kono's example and just start beating some sense into their team leader, he looks up to see a preoccupied expression on Steve's features. He smiles, and it's a sheepish thing playing on his lips.

Steve meanwhile is treated to the sight of Chin go from anger, to detachment, to plain old calm, and now to the sight of him smiling. That's more emotion Steve is used to seeing from the other man in just one sitting.

It makes him feel self-conscious and odd. When Chin continues to say nothing, he can't help but ask,

"What are you smiling at?" Steve says, accusation in his tone though he can't figure out if it has something to do with his own anger or from Chin's lack of it.

"You." Chin gets out with a weak laugh, "This. The fact that we're not talking crap or laying in to each other. Everything."

"Yeah, what's up with that?" Steve says hurriedly. "I thought you dragged me in here so you could give me one those lectures about power, responsibility, and all that."

"I hate to break it to you, kolohe, but back when I was working with your father he was the one doing the lecturing, not the other way around. And by the way bruh, I don't think I'm old enough to be giving out talks like that."

"What do you mean?"

"You know - _with great power comes great responsibility_ ," says Chin with a smirk, "You honestly didn't get that reference?"

"You're beginning to sound like Danny." Steve grumbles.

And that's the issue, Chin thinks. He doesn't know what exactly happened that evening they raided Bellcroft's hideout but he knows something big happened between them - Danny's unceremoniously delivered declaration of love notwithstanding, of course.

He's willing to give either of them the benefit of the doubt - not that he isn't okay with the idea, (being exposed to death on an everyday basis has a tendency to redefine one's priorities in life) it's just; Danny and Steve?

McGarett and the haole cop?

Chin isn't wordy unlike his cousin, so he can't put into words his opinions of the matter of Steve and Danny's connection, but even he knows that between the two of them they probably have enough problems to make diagnosing either a lesson in futility, never mind the actual therapy. And he doesn't even know Danny that well - only from his profile and the rest of the team's opinions of him.

He doesn't know how to make heads or tails with it, but it's the crux, the metaphorical heart of the problem. And he needs Steve to see it otherwise he's going to keep on acting like this.

So he lies. One simple lie that he knows is going to snap Steve out of this surfaced vendetta.

"Danny's awake." Chin says into the silence. He stands there as Steve opens his mouth to follow up on the thread of their conversation and whatever it is that he's about to say catches in his throat.

"He's... awake?" The color drains out of his face. It makes the dark stubble on his jawline stand out in stark contrast.

"Since yesterday. If you'd stayed long enough I could have told you just as he was waking up."

One moment he's his father, the next he's a stranger with a grudge.

The Steve before him though is nobody he's ever known. Chin practically jumps out of his skin when Steve moves to clasp him in a hug. Steve feels emaciated underneath his clothes - and to Chin, the embrace feels like Steve is bleeding all over him.

His body, taut with tension, softens underneath his fingertips. His heartbeat slows, his breathing hitches, his arms around him tightens, and Chin can't be sure since he's completely blindsided by this one gesture but he can feel - not just hear - Steve panting from relief.

It's these painful low breaths, the kind that rocks through his body that's not quite a shiver, not quite a sob, something that's completely different though it means the exact same thing. Steve's arms shake around his shoulders but abruptly he lets go.

"I gotta go." He says.

And so he does. Chin hears him exit through the double doors; he hears Steve usher a quick apology that judging from the ensuing silence has stunned both Kono and Jenna into submission. Chin walks out of the office, suddenly feeling unsure of himself.

Kono glances at the doors, looks to Chin, and then does the exact same thing again only with her fingers.

"What did you do?" She asks, astonished.

"I don't know. I think I'm going to have to get back to you on that."

* * * * *

Steve has seen the interior of hospitals aplenty - most times because he ends up being deposited there for a battery of perfunctory physicals after every mission; but even in his long, celebrated career as a Navy SEAL Steve has never had the experience of storming one with the intention of visiting a patient.

Technically, this is the first time he's ever visited anybody in the hospital. It's an impossibility - a man of 38 years old whose never had the opportunity to just drop by and say hello to a loved one, but then Steve's never really had enough family in his life, and even if the opportunity presented itself, always being a continent away from the people you love simply makes for casual visits to be unmanageable.

Therefore, nobody can blame Steve the first time he ends up being acquainted with hospital bureaucracy. The experience is pretty much a smack to the head. Never has there been a more insurmountable road block to Steve than a sour faced receptionist with a clipboard in hand and a cup of stale coffee in the other.

He tries every tactic imaginable; from bullying to flirting to wheedling and then to outright pleading. Everytime he approaches her, the woman only shoots her a bored look before asking in a tone that's flatter even than the dictionary definition of the word flat what it is that he's doing there.

Jesus, Steve has heard pre-recorded messages livelier than this woman's spiel; he's one second way from calling on the Governor (even though he doesn't know what exactly this will accomplish) when a local in a nurse uniform pulls aside the receptionist with an urgent look on his face.

He gives Steve an apologetic look as the woman marches away from the desk.

"Lt. Commander McGarett, right?" He asks as he shuffles papers out of sight.

"How do you know me?"

The man looks at him dubiously; somehow the expression on his face reminds him of a pair of cousins out somewhere.

"You show up on the morning news every now and then." He says as he hands him a slip of paper with a four digit number and a floor designation. Steve notices that the man's grip on his fingers lingers for a few more seconds than strictly necessary,

"That and Officers Kalakua and Kelly have already informed me that you were coming."

Steve frowns at this because the practice reeks of lax security. He really should just accept the slip of paper and go on his merry way but he can't help himself from blurting out,

"How do you know that it's me you should be expecting? I mean, okay, I show up in the news and you've probably seen me in a few choice articles - but what if that wasn't the case? Would you just let anybody in who's demanding to see a patient?"

To his undying credit, the man manages not to look offended. Instead, with a patient smile, he explains,

"Sir, with the description those two have given me, there's no way I'm going to confuse you for anybody else in this joint."

Curious, Steve asks, "Why? How'd they describe me?"

The man looks like he's on the verge of laughing. He takes a second to compose himself, biting his lips as he does before finally answering.

"'He's tall, he's handsome, he can't make small talk, and he's the only person who'll stop to you ask why you're letting him through when you give him the room number.'"

"Really?" Steve draws out the word, the smile on his face as flat as the earlier receptionist's intonation.

"That was how Officer Kalakua said it. Officer Kelly meanwhile was more straightforward - he asked me if I could let in the first savage I see wearing cargo pants."

"I appreciate what you're doing," Steve forces himself to say, "really, thank you, thank you so much."

"Of course," the man says, laughing, "anything for family."

And with that he leaves. He can't get himself to go any faster than this, torn as he is between apprehension and something he can't quite admit as excitement.

He reaches the floor in record time, having dismissed the elevator as useless and instead taking to the staircase at three steps a time. If Danny had seen him do this, Steve knows that he'd just about shoot his mouth off like an armalite at the unfairness of it all.

Of course he isn't, but it's the thought of what he'd say, what he'd do, the thought of him smiling, eyes crinkling with the color of the heart of the Pacific that nearly has him running through the hallways, held back only by the sheer fear of what he's about to see inside - that and the indecent looks the hospital staff are giving him as he runs past - though if he's being completely frank with himself, he couldn't really give a damn.

Only one pair of eyes matters to him at this point.

That's why, as he turns at the next corridor, he's completely surprised to find a little girl with the exact same eyes as Danny's looking up at him. The expression on her face, for lack of a better word in Steve's vocabulary, speaks of complete and utter bewilderment.

Steve looks up for a moment, breathless, his lungs on fire and his limbs feeling like they're made of lead. The number checks out - 0618.

Is this the right room? He looks around, feeling an odd sort of helplessness that in turn leaves him feeling like he's just been screaming that question recently into the empty air.

He's too afraid to move away or to knock on the door or to even ask the little girl in front of her questions.

He's eventually saved the trouble when the girl before her, eyes still lit like she's surveying a couple dozen of fireworks blooming in the night sky, asks in a voice that's oddly hushed and expectant at the same time,

"Are you Uncle Steve?"

Steve goes warm all over. He kneels down unto the floor, eyes going level with those eyes - bluer than the evening tide. Where Danny's is the unnameable blue of the brilliant morning skies, the girl before her has irises the color of an impending dawn.

"I-yeah, I'm - I mean - yes, my name is Steve. Can I ask you why know my name?" Steve questions. He doesn't know it yet but his voice has gone soft at the mere mention of his name by this beautiful little girl.

She smiles, a softer, kinder replica of a smile that's been permanently burned into the back of Steve's eyelids.

"Danno told me. He didn't really say what you were supposed to look like but in all the stories he told me he always made you sound like you were a superhero."

She looks him up and down assessingly, and then she grins at him, like she's telling him a really, really good secret. "You're the first person I've seen here who looks like one."

The laugh that escapes Steve is nothing short of precious. Too bad it doesn't last long.

"Hey monkey, you there? Is someone at the door? Can you please tell whoever it is to come in because I'm really tired, I need to get some rest, you know how Danno gets with his beauty sleep and the last thing he needs is another nurse coming in to wake him up for another blood test."

"It's not a nurse!" Grace yells through the door. "It's your friend!"

"The pizza delivery guy?" Danny yells back, tone hopeful.

Grace's face turns grave. "Since when are we friends with the pizza delivery guy? Doesn't he always give us pineapple pizza by mistake?"

"My daughter makes a fair point." Steve hears Danny remark to someone in the room.

He opens the door just as the other person inside answers with, "You mean _our_  daughter makes a fair point."

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding - of course that's what I meant Rachel." Danny says quickly.

It's a typical four-bedded hospital room, curtains drawn to serve as dividers. Inside are three people; one standing, one seated, and one lying down.

The man who's standing is clearly a local. Bald, strong features - he would have been intimidating had it not been for the smile on his face, too bright and languid. It reminds Steve of his former drinking buddies back in Annapolis.

The person seated though can only be Danny's ex-wife, Rachel. With a start, Steve realizes just how beautiful she is in person. The picture of her in the family portrait Steve had pulled up from the shorter man's file is nothing but a shadow of the real thing, and where Danny is all tan skin and startlingly blonde hair, Rachel is amber and porcelain. Her features are delicate, set with bright, intelligent eyes and a pair of lips curved always in amusement.

At the moment though they're drawn up in a small smile, sincere and indulgent at the same time. Her gaze is directed down at a man who's grinning back at her from the bed.

And there's Danny, Steve thinks, as he finally spies him on a thin hospital gown that's straining against the broad set of his shoulders in a way that Steve doesn't find surprising at all.

The lights are off, perhaps intentionally. The sole window of the room casts a burning light up against the drapes and the covers, gold and orange seeping through every corner of the unlit space.

The setting sun of Hawaii bathes the interior with an odd glow, but more importantly, it sets the side of Danny's face turned towards him on fire.

His hair is burnished gold, his eyes momentarily muted by the violent interplay of color. The smile he has on is unguarded, perfect, and Steve catches sight of it at the exact moment it glows its brightest.

He feels like paper and Danny's fire. He feels like that man with the wax wings who got too close to the sun, forever becoming a metaphor for the unattainable. But Danny isn't unattainable or out of his reach, even as he sees him surrounded by his family - an experience that he knows nothing of.

If anything else, it makes him want to reach farther, grab ahold of him tighter. Consequences are lost as he stares into him from the doorway. Danny opens his mouth, laughter erupting from him at the sight of Steve and it all becomes a blur of motion and white noise until he can't take it and Steve rushes in like he's always been rushing in and he just-

-holds his hand. In his. Danny looks at him with those eyes like pieces of the ocean and he's reeling deep inside - something just ended up pulling him back, tugging at him like garotte wire.

"There he is!" Danny exclaims, his voice exuberant and joyous and whatever other happy word you want to call it, "There's the man, Magnum himself has come to visit. Whatever took you so long to come here Steven?"

"Paperwork," Steve pushes the word past his unresponsive lips, "and then some. A lot of calls too if you can believe it."

Danny laughs at this as if he's on the know - and of course he is, the hell are you thinking, he's a COP, Steve mentally berates himself.

"I can imagine, though I can't say I pity you. You really should start learning how to file your own paperwork, Steve. Life as a Marine shouldn't stop you from experiencing every once in a while the joys and pains of having a desk job."

Steve closes his eyes.

_'I think you might have mistaken me for my car, Steven, but let me just get this out there, okay? - I DO NOT COME WITH BUILT-IN GPS. Why do you Marines constantly have to overcomplicate things? Why don't you just say something along the lines of 'Hey - I need you to start rifling out some addresses buddy' instead of all this coordinates crap, huh?'_

The memory makes him shiver for a moment. "Navy, Danny. I'm a Navy SEAL."

"Pfft, of course I knew that," Danny says with a dismissive flick of his wrist, "I'm just messing with you."

Steve lets go of Danny. From there the pleasantries follow.

The local introduces himself as Danny's partner from the precinct - Meka Hanamoa. The best Steve can think of to describe his demeanor is amicable, and he has to forcibly hold himself back to that judgment alone because his professional scrutiny of him exposes nothing more than that but weakness.

Steve hates himself for making that call in his head because he doesn't understand where it's coming from - or maybe he does. Looking at him there smiling, Steve can't help but dismiss him as somebody who isn't right to be partnered up with Danny.

The fact that a thousand reasons pop-up in his head readily from this single thought alone - first and foremost there being that he can't even manage to protect Danny's back as evidenced by his absence - scares the fuck out of him. This hostility isn't his.

Meka claps him on the shoulder and says something he can't make out, something he can only remember answering with a smile before heading out. Him leaving is a relief.

The rest of the visit though passes in confusion, even as Steve tries his best to hide it. Rachel and Danny bicker like - well, like a married couple. They talk about things Steve can't relate to, and there's no surprise to that, really, they've only been married for what, the better part of nearly two decades?

He's dimly aware that being in their presence together fosters something inside him. A feeling that he has no word for, or at least, a feeling that he can't bear to call by name, only that watching Rachel and Danny together even in this setting wounds him. It fucking does.

He smiles, he waves, makes small talk when appropriate, and after all this he's just grateful that his voice manages to come out sounding civilized.

Of all the strangers in the room, only Grace is the one he can't hate.

 _Because she's Danny's_ , Steve thinks.

"You have to take your meds, Daniel. Round the clock, right on the hour every hour, you hear me?" Rachel says gently, stroking the side of Danny's cheek with her pale fingers.

"Yes dear."

"And no walking. None at all. If you need to go to the bathroom, ask the nurses to help you. I don't want you getting off this bed for an instant, no matter what reason compels you to do so, especially if that reason happens to be trivial and chauvinistic, like insisting on walking yourself to the toilet because if you somehow had help in doing so you'd end up feeling like less of a man. I don't want any of that, you understand me?"

Danny splutters at this, "Like I'd ever do something like that! I happen to have a very healthy respect for the feminist movement."

"Good." Rachel says as she begins cleaning up.

Danny rolls his eyes and in doing so he ends up staring face to face at his daughter by his bedside. Steve sees Danny break out into a mile-wide smile, "Hey monkey! How do you feel?"

Grace looks up at her mom and then back towards her father with an inquiring expression. The look of skepticism on her face that follows is so Danny-esque that Steve can't help but hide his smile with a palm at the sight of it.

"Danno, I know feminist has something to do with girls but what's it got to do with movement?"

Danny looks positively alarmed at this. Rachel shoots a look of pleasant shock at her ex-husband and daughter.

"Monkey..." he says slowly, "maybe it would be better if you ask your mom that question instead."

"Mom?" Grace turns to her mother.

"No, no, honey, you know Danno is smarter than mommy. I bet he can tell you what the feminist movement is."

Expectant eyes turn to Danny. Steve is silently laughing at all this from his side and Danny expresses his displeasure by covertly kicking him from the underneath the blanket.

Danny stares at Grace for a count of maybe three seconds, and then abruptly he starts yawning. He blinks his eyes in what Steve supposes is Danny's way of appearing exhausted. As Grace watches over him closely, he starts rubbing the heel of his palm against his eyes. From the look on Grace's face, Steve can't blame her for being suspicious.

His voice comes out in an overly thick, affected tone of voice, "I'm sorry Gracie, Danno is feeling kinda sleepy now. I mean," he yawns again for added effect, "...rd questions like this really tuck me out."

"Danno, you're faking it." Grace accuses though there's nothing but a winsome smile on her face, "That's okay, though. You don't have to act all sleepy just because you don't know the answer. I'll just look it up on Google when we get back at the mansion."

Steve has abandoned covering his mouth with a palm. He's now shaking so hard from laughter he has to bite down on a knuckle from making a sound.

The look on Danny's face when he hears his daughter's intention to look up the meaning of the word on the internet is priceless. As Grace goes running out the room with his mother's purse, Danny latches on to Rachel's limbs like a frantic octopus and gets out the words,

"For the love of God, Rachel, turn off your wi-fi when you get home."

"Why?" Rachel asks, hands on her hips, "Don't you want your daughter to know more about how to assert herself?"

"She's eight, Rachel." Danny says in a throw-away manner as if the point in the statement is painfully obvious to everyone in the room, "She has plenty of time to assert herself - but I'd prefer my daughter to start acting like a typical teenager when she's old enough to be one."

"Why, Daniel, I do believe you are avoiding the question."

"That's because I am. Let's just say that my time in Hawaii has given me a pretty radical notion of what empowered girls grow up to become."

Unbidden, the image of Kono launching a perp into mid-air with a perfect roundhouse kick - from up above a speeding ten-wheeler no less comes to mind. Videos of it had gone viral on YouTube - and it had earned the rookie quite a following, especially since to say that the kick had managed to fling him unto incoming traffic was putting it lightly.

It had dropped the man into one of the busiest intersections in Honolulu where, unsurprisingly, he was then railroaded by a passing pick-up truck.

That was before H50. The woman caught on film of course was never explicitly revealed to be Kono, but how many girl cops were there in the local department anyway? Apparently the legendary video was still making its rounds back in the local PD. Chances were, somewhere along its circulation, Danny had seen the video too.

Rachel gives Danny a quick peck on the forehead. As she goes out the door, she flashes Steve a courteous smile and a small wave of her hand.

"It was nice meeting you Commander McGarett." She says, stopping just a few inches short of the doorframe.

"Actually it's just Lt. Commander, and I would much prefer it if you just called me Steve."

Rachel nods, "Steve it is." Turning to the man on the hospital bed, she breaks out into a mischievous grin, "And Danny? No promises."

"Oh come on." Danny whines.

For a moment, Steve thinks they're finally alone. Just as he turns to face Danny, there's a small shuffle outside, the sound of small feet running along and Steve turns back in time to see Grace breathless at the door, her short, blonde hair clinging to her face with perspiration.

She pulls out a folded piece of paper from her pocket, runs back inside to hug her father fiercely and then slides the note - whatever it is - into the covers of Danny's bed. She pulls back out, her eyes slightly wet with tears and Danny himself looking vulnerable at the fact that he has his daughter wrapped up in his arms.

She presses her small lips on Danny's forehead - the exact same place where Rachel had kissed him too, and for a moment Steve feels like pressing his lips on that exact same spot; not for any significant reason, nothing beyond the simple satisfaction of finally getting to leave his own mark on Danny.

And Jesus Christ, what the hell.

"What is this?" Danny says thickly, this time his voice is no longer an act.

"It's a picture I drew," Grace says proudly, "one day, I'm going to get as good as you with your drawings, Danno. And this - it’s my promise to you."

Danny unfolds the drawing gingerly.

Steve expects a drawing made in crayon, something illegible and child-like.

It is, but Danny might as well be looking at a Picasso or at one his own drawings with the way he is riveted at the sight of his daughter's sketch. It isn't until Steve stands up to survey the drawing from Danny's side that he finally makes out what it is.

It's a self-portrait. Grace has drawn herself with a bright red smile and yellow curves as her hair. The blue slip of a thing she's wearing must be a dress - Steve can't tell, it's a stick drawing after all.

On either side of her though are her parents. That must be Rachel with her red hair and earrings like Froot Loops. Beside her must be the new husband, a tall figure with dark hair and a smile also drawn in red crayon.

Danny is unmistakable though. He's blonde, his wide-shouldered, not to mention he's wearing a goddamn tie. And the fact that Grace has also put up a glaring sun in the background tells Steve that even Danny's daughter is silently critiquing his choice of wardrobe.

The blonde man says nothing except wrap his arms around his daughter once more. He gives a small squeeze, enough to get the girl to start giggling. Danny pulls her close, says something to her ear before sending her off with a goodbye that sounds like it's being painfully wrenched from his very being.

It's only when she rounds the corner and her footsteps vanish into the silence that Danny finally sags into the bed, every corner, line, every wrinkle of his face darkening.

For a moment, Steve can't think of something to say.

Danny looks at him out of the corner of his eyes. "You said you had a lot of paperwork to do?"

"Yes," Steve tells him, jolting out of his reverie, "yes, I did. A lot of forms, a lot of reports, insurance records to go through, witness testimonies, stuff like that."

"Huh," Danny grunts, "you must be swimming in paper if it took you nearly a week to finally show up."

A week?

"Hold up," Steve raises a finger, "I thought you'd only woken up yesterday."

Danny frowns. "Who told you that?"

Chin, thinks Steve. Chin said so, though he doesn't say it out loud. That must have been deliberate on his part. He looks up to see Danny watching him curiously, and in answer he just shakes his head in forgetfulness.

"Nothing - nobody. Must've slipped my mind."

Danny snorts. "Happy to know you find my situation so forgettable."

"It's nothing like that." Steve says defensively. "I just thought you needed - maybe, time away from anything work-related, I guess."

Danny casts his eyes to the ceiling. "You mean... time away from you?"

"Yeah. That too. Figured I'd qualify as something work-related too."

Danny shakes his head. It's too late when he realizes how that sentence must've sounded to Danny.

"Everybody needs time away from you, Steve. I think it has something to do with the number of guns you keep in your person, or the fact that you keep grenades in your pockets and in the glove compartment of other people's cars, not to mention your frankly unexplainable reluctance to call for back-up when everything about a given situation would normally call for it. There are literally a thousand reasons why people would need time away from you Steven, but not-"

He stops. Danny suddenly looks scared - one look at the paleness of his face and Steve is instantly reminded of the time he had nearly come close to putting a bullet through Danny's head, and just as quickly as the other man had gone pale, Steve has to push back against the tide of emotions that wells up inside him at the resurgence of the memory - of what he had nearly done to Danny and the thousand other things he could have done differently.

But maybe he feels reckless, because all the same the words tumble out of him.

"'-but not me.'" Steve finishes for him, "Everybody needs time away from me except... Danny, what do you mean by that?"

"Nothing." He says, unable to look him in the eyes. "Forget it. I didn't mean anything about that."

"Yes you did." Steve says, his heart beating against his rib cage loud enough to convince him that it should be heard from half a mile away. "You meant every word of what you said."

Danny idles, but finally the accusation in Steve's voice sets him on fire. "Fine. Okay. Maybe I meant what I said, what're you going to do about it?"

Steve tightens his grip - on what, empty air? Reality? He pulls himself close to Danny, near enough that he feels the heat radiating off his skin,

"Danny..." His words taste like ash in his mouth, his tongue like a limp instrument for all the good it does, "I didn't mean to stay away. I didn't know."

"You didn't have to come here, you know? You didn't have to force yourself to come, to keep up appearances, to lie about not knowing I've woken up. You don't have to keep on humoring me, McGarett. You don't have to do all these just to convince me that I am of any importance to your task force."

"You are-"

"Like this?" Danny growls. He raises his hands as if to better indicate the state of his body. He doesn't have to - every wound, every mark, every bruise on Danny's body is a failure on his part; it's on him. In fact, Steve wishes it WAS on him - every injury that had befallen the man. It would make forgiving himself easier, what he had made Danny go through, if he just didn't have anything to show for in that department.

Danny laughs bitterly. "Steve, a bullet nearly tore through a major artery - had that happened, nothing would have stopped me from bleeding to death. I have three broken ribs, a gash on my forehead that needed seven stitches to close, a couple of bullet holes just a few inches shy of my stomach, and, get this - I shredded - not tear - but _shredded_ , a fucking ACL running away from a squad of highly competent gunmen who you had not indicated would be showing up."

"Danny-"

"I can't walk without _fucking going catatonic_! I am on painkillers around the clock, and thanks to you I have two months of nothing to look forward to in my diet except for mush and protein shakes. Did I mention I was out of practice, Steven? Did I mention that I am _just_ , as they say a police consultant? I could barely shoot in the right direction, Steven, and you had me charging headlong into the fray like I was a part of your goddamn task force!"

"You are!"

"Well, not anymore it looks like." He says, sounding like every definition of the word bitter.

Danny's wheezing. Steve feels for his hands and finds it underneath the covers. Danny should be flinging them away but he doesn't. Instead, he takes it in his and he squeezes tightly.

The blonde man looks to him helplessly, the blue of his irises lost in a sea of red. A growl, injured, guttural, escapes through his lips and Danny slams a hand unto the bedside table, knocking the vase placed precariously on it onto the floor where it shatters.

He continues making these noises - these sounds of frustration, and Steve clings to his grip, unsure of whether to leave the man to his devices or to sit here and watch him go down further in pain and humiliation.

"I can't help you." Danny finally confesses, "How can I? I can barely even keep from pitching myself into the shark infested waters of this goddamn island."

Steve purses his lips. Outside, the sun is finally starting to sink beneath the tides - indigo spreads unchecked through the skies and it bathes the room in darkness.

"I once asked you if you wanted to be here." Steve whispers.

He can't tell what Danny's thinking, not with the way the shadows outside are hiding him from his sight.

"Back when I was the one who was bedridden and you were the one sitting down, watching over me. Do you remember what you said then?"

"I probably made a fucking joke." Danny says dismissively, "People tell me I'm good with those."

Steve hopes Danny can see the way he smiles, that he can somehow ignore the casual insanity he brings to this situation - that maybe he'll think this scene in the shadow is perfect in its own way, that maybe it's beautiful enough to warrant looking back on, and that despite everything maybe he'll manage to draw the best of what's about to happen.

Because this is all he can offer him. This is the farthest Steve can acknowledge what it is that he feels about him.

"I hope you meant what you said." Steve's grin is hidden in the darkness.

"That you're stupid for working yourself half to death? That if Chin and Kono really knew what they were doing, they'd put you down for the animal that you are?" Danny muses.

"No." Steve says, and he can't help it but he's laughing too. Even here Danny can still manage to make him laugh; how could it take him so long to see this for what it really was?

"You said that you wanted to be here because of me."

"I- I said that?" Danny sounds taken aback.

Steve laughs a little harder. It's a long time coming but finally, he capitulates.

Steve grips Danny's fingers. It doesn't matter that it's separated by a barrier of cotton because his lips and Danny's finally have nothing separating them.

Steve molds his lips into Danny's, his kiss painfully tender, so slow and anxious and unsure, where they've always been certain and deliberate before. He registers Danny's shocked intake of breath, the way the other man pulls back from the contact, but Steve's hand has found its way onto his throat and his fingers are digging into the back of his scalp so hard, so desperate, he's no longer sure if he's keeping Danny from pulling away or himself from pulling apart.

Danny struggles, and for a brief second, he feels like he just took a dive straight into a vat of molten metal from the pain and the rejection of it. But then, like a river - surging in turn to fill empty spaces where concrete once held it captive, Danny gasps, and then he pushes back in, his kiss insistent, biting, scathing.

Danny's fingers break away from Steve's grip and they slide against the skin of his arms, going higher and higher, the glide of his calloused digits sending incandescent sparks high into the air and the very idea that it's Danny kissing him back, Danny nearly panting from relief, breathing like the oxygen in his lungs have caught on fire because he's kissing him and Steve's kissing him in turn.

He's never burned this good.

Steve crowds Danny's jaw with his fingers, and for so long he's treated this man like tinkling china, letting him rant and rant and do as he please, that the impulses flooding through him makes it all the more likely that he's going to forget and break him by accident.

There's the slither of tongues, wet heat pushing against each other, insistent and running aground with electricity with each press. Danny moans like he can't help it - his fingers claw at Steve's shirt, fabric fisted in his, and Steve pushes the injured man down because he's not in control. Not anymore.

Steve pulls away, breathing in the air of the room heavily. He's never needed to draw such painful breaths before but now he can't stop - the synapses in his body are coruscating with need, and he can't pull himself away from Danny's wanton grip or his broken breathing long enough to think they shouldn't be doing this.

But somehow, Danny's found a way to pull his shirt up and his naked back is exposed to the door. And then, Danny's buried his face into his chest, hot, questioning lips teasing at a nipple. Even the slightest nudge of Danny's tongue against the bud of flesh makes Steve feel electricity sparking in his groin, and when Danny playfully pinches it in between his teeth at the same time digging in his nails against the small of his back, Steve can't help the whine that leaves him because everything is unspooling and dear God he needs Danny's lips around his cock this instant.

The pleasure of it all is almost painful in its own way and it causes Steve to buck; he ends up grinding against the side of Danny's bed, the entire thing rocking like a raft tossed against the ocean.

" _Jesus fucking Christ_..." Danny moans against the hollow of Steve's chest, " _Now_ you do this to me?... _Now_ you pull this shit on me, now of ALL TIMES when I can barely even rock my hips? Do you have a thing for disability, McGarett? Do you have a thing for people who are black and blue and bloody as fuck because if that's the case? Then there is something seriously wrong with you."

"Shut up." Steve orders. Danny tries to laugh at this but Steve pre-empts him by climbing unto the bed and grinding himself directly against Danny's crotch.

The resulting sound of Danny's laughter evaporating, making way for a helpless, confused whimper gets Steve impossibly hard. He tries to sit down against his legs - he doesn't know what he's doing, just making it up as he goes - but Danny lets out a hiss of pain from the momentary contact and Steve knows he can't go farther than this.

"You gotta be kidding me..." Danny groans, "God, why do you have to make even these complicated for me?"

"Do you _have_  to start praying while we're trying to _fuck_?" Steve snaps from on top of him.

Danny roars with laughter, the sound infectious despite its lack of breath. "Just this once, I'll be willing to admit - that now and then you make some really great points - oh God, _Steve_."

It's so damn dark now but maybe it’s better that it is, for what reason Steve doesn't know. Steve places a hand against the naked skin of Danny's legs and slowly he draws it up until he's fingering the hem of Danny's hospital gown.

For a moment, he lingers at the junction of his thighs, reveling at the strength of his muscles and the slight damp feel of his skin. He inches further until his fingers arrive at the soft feather down of hair underneath the cotton.

The reaction is instant - Danny's breath catches, and he lets out a loud, reckless groan of moral abandon that has Steve hurrying to strip himself of all clothing, all barriers - the impulse screwing deep into every inch of his being.

A hand finds itself on top of Steve's shaking one, and it presses against him, moving his grip further and further down, past the patch of soft, curling hair with unbearable slowness until Steve finds him there - hot and heavy, soft and hard at the same time.

Danny moves to shape Steve's hand over himself, shaking fingers guiding frozen ones. Danny's breaths are steaming against his skin, and the moan that escapes him when Danny moves to pump his cock with Steve's slack grip undulates over his body like a current.

Steve groans as he throws his head back - feels like he's going to come apart without even the barest amount of friction against his own cock with the way Danny is ravaging himself with Steve's nervous grasp. He's taken off his shirt and his pants are pooling at his ankles but finally he manages to bear himself.

His erection is bordering on painful, but when he finally thrusts into their shared grip, his cock rubbing up against Danny's, he nearly blacks out from the sensation.

Their fingers are sweaty and slick with precum, their callouses dragging against the sensitive heads of their cocks; their fingers fit snuggly against each other, and the makeshift entrance is so tight and hot that each thrust inside it borders on overwhelming pain and bone-deep pleasure.

Steve is pushing into Danny with a ferocity that leaves the bed beneath them creaking, and the idea that at any moment they could be discovered with one twist of the knob behind them is driving him out of his mind with arousal.

The idea is a cold spread all over the expanse of his naked back, his arms and chests erupting in goose bumps. A delicious pulling of muscle and sinew - a heavy pooling deep within his groin - all this sensations drive him to thrust harder, faster, deeper into their clasped fingers.

Steve bites down on a broad shoulder, and some part of him knows that this should be painful for Danny considering his injuries - but Christ, the noises coming from him are far from discouraging.

He keeps thrusting, long after the discomfort of skin rubbed raw registers. Bittersweet and salty from sweat, and with Danny's own flavour flooding his mouth, Steve drags his lips over the hard, rippling of the shorter man's chest.

Danny's breaths come quick and broken now, and Steve himself - he's not going to last long anymore - the sinful glide of skin on skin, the painful pressure building up inside him, that feeling of breaking completely in half -

He can't he can't Jesus he can't-

Danny gasps out a word,

" _Steve_." He pleads.

He pulls his face close to Steve's, his eyes closed, his breath tickling the hollow of his throat. Danny's groan as he archs against Steve reverberates through him, a noise that is completely torn out of him. Steve feels him spasm underneath, feels Danny's cock strain against the rough palm of his hand as the orgasm rips out of him violently, wet, streaks of white staining their stomachs and fingers.

Steve bites down on the noise that rips out of him in turn. He thrusts once, twice, and just like that the pooling inside him overflows, the dam coming apart - Steve closes his eyes and lets out a shivering groan as he goes slack, unstrung, collapsing in on himself. Steve comes all over Danny's chest, white spurts covering the soft blonde hair of his chest.

He feels himself go boneless and his limbs liquefy. Pressed against each other as they are, they fall back down to bed with a crash.

Steve takes a few seconds to come down from the atmosphere. He comes back into being with a shivering of awareness and it's to find Danny, face still pressed against him, whimpering like an injured animal.

He tries to ask him what's wrong but for a few moments all that comes out of his mouth is a hoarse panting. Finally, he manages to pull himself together long enough to string a collection of syllabic noises that constitutes words from the English language and what comes out is, "Are you okay, Danny?"

For a moment, Steve fears that their impromptu fuck has left Danny with more injuries, and given the desperate quality of it all it's very much a possibility.

All fear evaporates though when Danny finally pulls himself up, his laughter coming out in gravel-like rasps as he squeezes each of Steve's shoulders weakly.

He's still laughing when Steve hears noises from the corridor and has to bolt from their position to fix his clothing so as to make it look like nothing incriminating had just happened.

He doesn't get far.

The noises are growing louder - he barely remembers to zip his pants closed - and it's only then that Steve remembers to pull Danny's crumpled and sweaty hospital gown back down because the man doesn't look like he'll be moving any time soon. He manages to pull up the covers just as a nurse enters through the door.

She idles at the entrance for a few moments and suddenly harsh, fluorescent light illuminates the room. She turns around, eyes cast down at the clipboard in hand before finally looking up. Her eyes linger on the two of them, no doubt wondering at the guilty expression on their faces when finally a look of casual dismissal comes over her face and she sidles up to Danny's bedside.

"Mr. Williams." She says in greeting.

"I will never get used to that." Danny croaks. The weak rasp of his voice alarms the nurse enough to cause her to start fussing all over him. Danny allows himself to get fussed over, while Steve watches from his bedside. With the nurse's back turned towards him, Steve casts a furtive eye all over his rumpled clothing.

He is mildly horrified to see that he put on the shirt inside-out and with the tag sticking out at front. He doesn't have enough time to take the shirt off and put it on the right way, so when the nurse spins around to ask him about something (no doubt something to do with why the two of them are soaking wet with sweat) Steve surreptitiously rips it off with a forefinger and thumb.

The nurse begins berating the two of them for not turning on the lights and Steve nods and says sorry the entire time, too tired and content to say otherwise. He lets her talk - by now he's completely used to this - when somewhere along her tirade, he finds his eyes drawn to Danny's.

And he's smiling at him. And it's not Danny's usual acerbic grin, all sharp edges and bitter mocking - nor is it the smile Danny always seems to hold in reserve for his daughter.

The smile playing on Danny's lips is one that he's never seen before.

It's sad and it's happy and it's unmistakably Danny. It's not that Steve's run out of words - it's that Danny himself is a definition of something he can never quite understand, only feel.

There's a point high up in his chest - he can't determine where it is exactly - that's unfolding slowly at the sight of the man smiling, and as it does it sends his veins singing with dark warmth.

He stands there transfixed, holding Danny's gaze for as long as he can.

Some small part of Steve begs to stay - but the rest of him though, including that part of him that still can't shake off the memory of almost pulling that trigger on Danny, can't wait to leave.

Should he?

Danny looks at him hard and long. As if reading the better part of his mind, Danny nods at him, an unspoken goodbye, and then his mouthing the word "go" over the nurse's shoulder and wordlessly he complies.

The meaning of that gesture only crosses his mind later.

He realizes it long after he finally steps out of the hospital.

_I can't help you. How can I? I can barely even keep from pitching myself into the shark infested waters of this goddamn island._

_Danny saw this coming_ , Steve thinks as the shock of cool, humid air rushes over him as he exits the hospital.

Danny knew that this was the closest thing Steve would ever come to acknowledging what they had between the two of them. Outside, Steve suddenly finds what they just did to be coarse - and reprehensible. Was he so desperate and wrong in the head that he couldn't come up with a better resolution to all this outside of a quick, rough fuck?

It should have clued Steve in - the almost plaintive way he took to his advances. Christ, Danny could even tell that he was reluctant to stay.

Though he never thought about how this would end exactly, thinking about it now Steve realizes that this was inevitably how it was going to end between them.

And Danny saw through the entire thing.

So he should be happy, right?

He got what he wanted, got to do his part, and he didn't even have to tell Danny a single thing.

Steve looks up from where he's standing. He's halfway towards Danny's Camaro though he very well can't take it with him now that he knows Danny's awake.

He idles on the sidewalk, the night around him stifling with heat and silence.

What's tomorrow going to be like? He thinks.

He feels foolish and scared all of a sudden, and yet Steve still breaks out into laughter. He's warm and cold all over, skin and clothes filthy with sweat and flecks of cum. The noise is being ripped out of him, bubbling up deep from his chest and his stomach, rising from hidden reserves, this misplaced sense of catharsis - and it is, because everything considered Steve got something right even from all of this.

He doesn't know - or maybe he won't admit it - if he is in love. With Danny.

Danny the flatfoot from Jersey. Danny the haole to end all haoles.

Danny who bitches the way nobody can bitch. Whose hands come alive with the slightest provocation like birds taking to flight. Danny who throws around the word "babe" like it's nothing more than air and teasing.

It took losing Wo Fat's trail, more than a dozen murders, a firefight burning rubber, a week-long stint in a motel, a suicide attempt masquerading as a training regimen, and a short, blonde, mouthy as fuck cop with eyes that leave him feeling like a castaway to finally realize the goddamn most simple thing in the world.

That Danny makes him happy.

He suddenly wants to go back in there and say things and make it right, damn it all to Hell. But even as he thinks this he knows it isn't going to be fair for either of them. For one, Steve doesn't even know what to say, and no doubt Danny has had enough of him for today.

But it doesn't matter if right here, right now, he doesn't have the answer.

He'll live. He's not down yet.

He'll question. Get to come up with answers on his own.

Hell, maybe he'll even get to make a few more mistakes and that's a-okay.

 _Because Danny makes me happy_ , his blood sings.

Steve looks up to the darkening skies of Honolulu, and all he can hear in the heavy silence of the city is the rush of the island sound - and it comes to him laughing in his own voice, and with Danny's heartbeat pounding a rhythm of its own in the background.

 

IX. Final

 _"Breathe out and breathe in_  
_We're still forgetting_  
_Breathe out and breathe in_  
_We'll be forgiven_ _."_  
_Madeon ft. Aquilo - Innocence_

Danny gets released on a Tuesday afternoon about a month later - that's 20 days since he and Steve last talked.

The case is still on-going though with the lack of activity from the remaining killers, new cases have ended up taking priority.

Danny doesn't know how this translates to his working agreement with McGarett - afterall, he only signed up for the duration of the case - though if said case has gone to dormancy, does that mean that technically he's still part of 5-0?

Ha, who's he kidding? Danny thinks to himself. He knows that he's just looking for excuses to go up to Steve and knock him upside the head with a baseball bat - but doing so would cross that line, the aptly named McGarett line - in his brain.

And he'd be damned before he breaks first.

Danny pretty much figured out the SEAL's deal. Not that he has any more experience in the entire thing - but he does know more about people in general to know that Steve is the kind of person who'll never man up to what he feels (because doing so probably qualifies as weakness in his book).

So he sits pretty. Or in this case, he goes back to working for the HPD.

Which. Sucks. Ass.

And not in the good way.

He's pretty much resigned himself to being the poster boy for unwanted attention and workplace harassment of the non-sexual kind (fetching coffee, buying toilet paper, being on the wrong end of every other argument) inside the department when Meka walks up to him one day with a grin on his face that would probably mean "Merry Christmas" if not for the fact that it's been rendered unpronouncable in the Samoan tongue.

"What is it now? Does Nancino need another tube of toilet paper? If he does, coming from the haole ask him 'whether or not one of his parents was an elephant' because he sure craps like one."

"Better." Said Meka, smiling, then he frowns. "Or worse. I don't know anymore - it's not like I have a paid subscription of your love life."

"What's this got to do with my love life?" Danny asks as he rummages in (Meka's) desk for his sketchpad.

"Come outside." Meka tells him.

And so he does.

Outside the PD, sunshine is abundant. It lances through the skies with all its radiant splendour to give unsuspecting tourists and locals who've put on too little sunscreen magnificent sunburns of the third-degree seeming and cancer.

Cancer is the right word here, really, because just as he casts his eyes out unto the street he spots a nail poking out over the crowd. His mood takes a turn for the worse and he begins to feel like the rest of the crowd - like he's forgotten to put on enough sunblock.

The aforementioned nail is tall and dark and is smiling at him blithely.

Danny turns around to look at Meka watching the two of them with interest.

"Are you expecting something?" Danny says breezily.

"Well, yes."

"If it's anything of the makeout persuasion then you're way out of luck."

Meka looks taken aback. "I'm not looking forward to anything like that."

"I get it, I get it - you don't have to say anything." Danny says as he descends the steps, though he does shoot Meka a warning glance because he seems intent on following him down too.

They meet up by the highway. By some miracle cars are not passing through.

Danny takes this as further proof that the universe has nothing better to do than to mess around with his life by dropping a monkeywrench named Steve deep in the middle of it.

"What?" He quips. "Did another hobo die from something in their beer?"

"This is a social visit." Steve says, his smile still set in that smug manner.

"Somehow when you say 'social visit', I don't imagine friends - I imagine people in custody."

Steve raises an eyebrow. Danny gnaws at his lips, frustrated that even after nearly three weeks of not meeting, hostility somehow still bleeds from every word coming out of his mouth.

"Last time I checked, we parted on amicable terms." Steve says accusingly as he seats himself down against the hood of his very, very flashy Impala.

How the hell did Danny not notice the Impala?

"Amicable terms, my ass - we fucked. That doesn't constitute parting in a civilized manner."

Steve shakes his head in an almost knowing way. A summer breeze whips past and it's another strike to Danny's well-being seeing that when he runs a hand to steady his do, he finds his blonde hair flying every which way like corn silk.

He takes a moment to slick it back and when he looks back down Steve is laughing.

"What?" Danny snaps. "There's nothing funny about this conversation. May I remind you that my ACL hasn't completely healed yet since our last stunt and for that you owe me a cane."

"A cane?" Steve splutters. The look he gives him makes Danny pretty sure that the other man just conjured an image of him in his head as an invalid. The idea is enough to make him long for the aforementioned cane so he can smash it into splinters breaking Steve's back.

"Yes. A cane." Danny says patiently. "Now can I pull you back from space, babe? What is it that you're doing here?"

At the word 'babe', Steve somehow smiles at him in triumph.

"What are you smiling at?"

Steve shrugs, the movement undulating his shoulders.

"I missed you." He says simply.

There will never come a time when Danny will admit to anyone living or dead that hearing those three words alone from Steve pretty much left him defenseless inside - it's like the fucking Walls of Jericho in there - that and at the same time it also gave him the indications of a coming hard-on.

Danny doesn't know which one of the two he is more likely to admit. Probably both but a few more points go to the former.

"I didn't." He lies.

"You're obviously happy to see me." Steve points out - though thankfully he's not aware that he's actually correct about that in more ways than one.

"Shut up." Danny growls, blushing (which leaves Steve confused as always) "I don't care what it is that you came here for but I'm not going back to 5-0."

Steve clucks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "I may be the head of the task force but my interests and 5-0's interests do not exactly run aground with each other."

"Meaning?" Danny says, "That you don't need me, but 5-0 does?"

"It's actually the opposite." Steve tells him.

Danny stills.

"If you think that that statement is the least bit flattering, you're dead wrong."

And at that Steve stands up to display his full height. Danny stops where he is - moving as he was towards the steps. "I'm not trying to flatter you, Danny - I'm trying to tell you the truth."

"And you think I'll respond to this?" Danny's voice fractures as he screams out into the sunshine.

There's words flowing out of him, unrehearsed but it might as well have been inked into the folds of his brain because it comes to him perfectly - and even as he hears himself say it, Danny makes sure to roll every word off his tongue with the deliberate intention of making it hurt.

"You think hearing you tell me I'm not good enough to be part of you folks will somehow magically make me want to become a member? Steve, you may be a fucking SEAL but I took investigative psychology as part of my training. Whatever line you're taking this in, I suggest you stop because it's never going to work."

He takes immense satisfaction in seeing Steve flinch, his diatribe the crack of a bullwhip. But it's too much to hope Steve won't answer. His face darkens and then he begins to speak, haltingly,

"That's right. Danny, I've been trained to point and shoot, and Naval intelligence doesn't exactly deal with people specifics - I don't know any of that stuff - that is why I need you - you get people. You know things like psychology and - profiling and sketching and-"

Something in the way Steve speaks makes it sound as if even he can't make sense of what he's saying. It only causes Danny to get riled up even further.

"And yet you tell me I'm not good enough to be part of 5-0?" Danny says as he descends, "Steve, why is it that when you argue, you always get your wires crossed? Why do you always have to put me in the position of having to choose whether to follow you blindly and trust that it's all going to be okay in the end, or to ask for a little trust myself and get screwed over for asking?"

"Danny I have never asked you to follow me blindly into anything-"

He doesn't even bother to deign that answer with a response of his own. Instead, he says, "Steve, I ask again, what is this about?"

They fall silent for a minute. In that span of time, all he hears is Steve's breathing growing uneven.

"I don't know." Steve finally gets out.

In almost two months of trying to back Steve up into a corner and this is the first time Danny actually feels like he managed to do just that.

"I don't have a clue, Danny. I'm not like you - I don't have people figured out. But you - you I have."

"Oh? Enlighten me then. Do pray tell!"

And Steve tries.

There's a static feel of mania in the space between them.

When he opens his mouth, he gets shot down and just this once he lets Steve talk (because he's done enough of that already for either of them).

"You're proud, Danny. I get it - you have every right to be. You're a good cop and you get things done well, always, but you can also be fucking arrogant. Even if I asked, you would have never taken my offer to be part of 5-0 if you yourself felt like you weren't good enough for it. You won't accept it because it feels like table scraps to you - and if there's one thing that I'm sure to God of about you, it's that you have never in your life accepted anything out of pity."

"I'm asking you to come back, not because of 5-0. 5-0 comes second to this. They may be smarter than you, are better shots than you, and they may all be able to get around without having to carry around canes like you-"

"Fuck you."

"-but none of them know how to _pull me back_.  Them, I mean - Chin, and Kono - whenever I go rushing in, they follow me into the firefight. Even when it's dangerous. They do this because they can't convince me to pull out, and they won't try because they know I won't listen. But nobody gets that I can also scare myself shitless whenever I go running headlong into the fray."

Danny attempts to speak at this point - try to hammer some sense into Steve before he can fully drown him out in this unexpected insanity, but looking at the man - his earlier bravado gone, trying to explain himself in this manner of desperation that's beginning to infect even him - Danny doesn't have the heart to do so.

Maybe Steve sees him acquiesce because his words slow down, his tone of voice switching from frantic to pleading. He sees him take maybe two steps towards his side of the pavement but instead he ends up in the middle of the road, and Danny wishes so much that his heart wasn't so transparent because he ends up squawking like a seagull in protest at Steve's sudden turn in behaviour.

"Danny, of all the people I know, you are the only one who stood up to me."

Danny can't help the grimace on his face or the way his nails seem to dig deep enough to carve trenches into his palms. Steve is throwing around goddamn sentiments in the middle of the road and yet it doesn't matter because the words he wants to hear most aren't there.

"You don't blindly follow orders - you go against them. You have to understand. I lose myself in the gunfight - the reason why I can face all those bullets headlong without flinching is because I basically have to push down on everything that makes me care, because you can't go into the middle of a war pre-occupied about something because that's how you lose everything.

"But one of these days I will get shot." He continues.

"And I will lose everything then. I will keep running into guns and knives, putting myself in the line-of-fire for duty and honor over and over again, and people will follow me into danger because they won't leave me behind to something like that. I will put myself into harm's way because that is all I know and that is what's expected of me."

"No one ever let's me be scared. Except you."

Danny sees oncoming traffic hurtling towards them and he's torn between standing there waiting for Steve to fucking finish his speech or pull him towards him - but he's admitted to so many things already, things that have either been ignored or gone unanswered - and he feels like one more gesture of reaching out is just too much.

But Jesus Christ, why does he feel like every second he spends keeping himself still - stopping himself from just shoving Steve back to his side of the road or pulling him towards his feel so much like torture?

"You scared me the day you told me you wouldn't take no for an answer. And you've been scaring me ever since - like when you left me at the motel when I couldn't tell you about the envelope, or that day when I was the one in the hospital and I woke up and for the first time someone was there waiting for me and not because they needed to give me a report or wait to be briefed for another mission - you were there because you said wanted to."

"So - what? You want me to be your lifeline? You want me in just because you need someone who can pull you to safety? That's it? Steve, are you actually telling me - that you are so emotionally backwards, that you need someone to point out a situation to you where it is alright to feel scared just so you can finally admit it to yourself that you are?"

"I know it isn't what you want."

"Damn right, it isn't what I want." Danny presses down on the scream caught in his throat and settles instead for slashing his fingers through the air to illustrate his point. "Nobody in their right mind would EVER want that kind of job."

"Please consider-"

"-there's nothing to consider." He says as he turns his back on Steve and goes back up the steps, "Thank you for your long-winded speech, Commander, but if all you need is a reason to stop yourself from running into the sights of some hitman's gun, call the suicide hotline. I'm pretty sure behaviour like yours qualifies as such."

Danny heads up convinced that he's okay with it ending like this. Barring their agreement on the case (if that's even still in effect), Danny no longer has any personal obligation to Steve. He said what he felt, meant every word of it, and he knew that with the way Steve was there was never going to be a chance for any of it to happen.

Briefly, he thought there was when he whispered his confession into the night and heard Steve respond into the silence. But that was just adrenaline, gunpowder, and desperation - they were just words, and words wear off in the cold light of reality.

God, three weeks and the first time he meets him Danny ends up wrecked body and soul.

Soul because every step he takes farther from Steve and closer to the precinct's entrance feels like hell. And body because - and Danny really should have expected this given reality's track record of screwing him over - as he looks back at Steve, his ankle folds in on itself.

Did he mention the shredded ACL?

Yes. Danny thinks he did. And curiously none of its symptoms seemed to be acting up today until McGarett came along.

Instantly, Danny's leg is consumed by a conflagration of the senses. Pain has become a state of mind. He trips, lands on his wrist, skins a knee right through the fabric of his slacks before finally knocking the side of his head against the metal handhold.

Steve screams out his name and he goes running, he knows - because he can see his freakishly long legs covering the distance between there to where he lay bleeding like a wounded animal out of the corner of his eye.

It's doubly insulting when Steve finally gets to him and turns him over like he plans on bridal carrying him the rest of the way to the hospital and the first thing he ends up saying while drunk on pain is,

"If you sling me over a shoulder I will make loose change out of your perfect, perfect teeth."

"Danno. Danno, I got you-"

"What did you call me?" Danny asks in spite of himself. He's being hauled bodily to his feet and it's an indignity, a grown ass man being carried around like a rag-doll by an admittedly very attractive caveman - but the nickname is a bigger thing here.

He makes the mistake of twisting in Steve's grip - blue and grey catch at each other.

And as it turns out, Steve's eyes have never been the color Danny had imagined them to be. He's always been looking at them from a far, or imagining them as darker than what they should be.

But it's not. Steve's eyes are carbon and flint, as dark and as easy to set aflame as coal. Even wide-eyed as he is now, his eyes smolder. But amidst the grey lining his pupils, Danny sees flecks of green - the hint of twisting ivy, olive and viridian.

It may be the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

And as Steve puts him gently back against the steps, his arm reaches out like it did that first day at the coffee shop. And this time though, Danny doesn't withdraw it.

His fingers trace the underneath of his eyelids, smoothing out the shadows and the lines pooling there. He drags his fingers up the side of his face, gently, soothingly, as if he's making a rubbing - and finally he frames it around Steve's eyes and here in this limited space, seen between the gaps of his fingers, Danny swears the green in Steve's irises are glowing.

"Danno?" Steve blinks.

"Why are you so hard to understand?" Breathes Danny.

Steve pulls at Danny's fingers as if they're hot to the touch before gingerly placing them palms down against his knees, his own palms shaping his.

Steve doesn't know the answer to that question. So he stays silent.

Danny - like he always does - answers first.

"I'll do it."

Steve blanks out. Shock gives way to disbelief.

"Really?" He asks, his voice the rasp of gravel - and the familiarity of it all is too much it tears into Danny and exposes him down to the bare bone. All it takes is him closing his eyes and he can imagine the motel all over again, the aching and the need to look away lest he give himself away back in full force.

"I'll do it and more-" Danny says and already he regrets it, but all that matters is Steve will have him, that he'll be with him - and that he can see him smiling at him right now, "-I'll do it because you need me every bit as much as I-"

He can't say anything more than this. And Steve understands.

"I'm sorry." Steve tells him. Danny knows what he's apologizing for even when Steve himself doesn't. The idea makes him smile despite the bitter taste in his mouth and the steel and copper in his throat.

"It won't... it won't happen again, right?" Danny asks him.

He doesn't know what bleeds him more. The fact that Steve doesn't understand what it is that he's asking him, or the look in Steve's eyes that says he'll say yes to anything if he thinks it will make Danny happy.

So Steve says,

"Yes. It won't happen again."

Danny closes his eyes and rests.

* * * * *

They still have coffee. Every now and then.

Steve barbecues fish at his backyard because the man has apparently sworn off eating meat from anything that comes from above ground.

Danny shares his Longboards, and sometimes - when the timing's just right - he gets to spend weekends with Steve because his daughter is smitten with him and Danny can't be bothered to dissuade Grace from her belief that "Uncle Steven" is a superhero in disguise.

They grow closer to each other.

Steve insists on Danny learning how to shoot again - so during off-days when the crack dens of Oahu are miraculously lying low, he takes Danny with him to the shooting range back at his old navy base in the island and Danny comes hobbling with his cane - bitching and moaning all the way though every bone in his body would sooner melt into marrow rather than disappoint Steve.

In return, Danny takes Steve to fancy restaurants where they can blow his hard-earned pay on smooth wine, cheap beer, and beef (because Steve really needs a source of protein outside of canned beans and rations of nuts from military packs because he's not a goddamn chipmunk).

One day, Danny finally gets up the nerve to show him a drawing of Steve.

It's the one back at the motel - him dripping water into that polyester mat, shadows carving deep grooves of darkness unto his naked back. His face is turned to the side, enough to catch a glimpse of one eye.

And Danny painstakingly colours it in despite the drawing being black and white. The picture is startlingly beautiful - a single spot of colour in an otherwise drab sketch. Steve gets so choked up by this that he doesn't even know what to do, so he croaks out a 'Thank you' and Danny ends up laughing at him for tearing up with sentiment.

Steve returns the favor by getting him tickets for three nights at the Kahala Hotel where he proposes the idea that Danny spend that time with Grace swimming with dolphins.

And Danny can't say no to his daughter finally getting to swim with her all-time favorite animal so he takes them gratefully from Steve. His thank you is sullen and maybe punctuated by a few too many jokes but Steve waves them away like the empty air it is and it leaves Danny reeling.

Kono and Chin - even Jenna - they see it building in them. In the moments they spend at the hallways arguing about things like their favorite rock bands (Rolling Stones for Danny, The Beatles for Steve) or whether or not the Geneva Convention is way too restrictive on certain occasions. (Steve, of course.)

They see it in the way Steve delights in messing up the stack of paperwork on the desk of Danny's brand new office, or the way Danny unconsciously always makes two cups of coffee everytime he heads for the coffee maker.

After two weeks of this, Danny ends up with a file cabinet that's been padlocked against Steve's ministrations, and the counter where the coffee maker sits prettily now has two chipped mugs hanging from hooks.

Nobody brings up the confession even though the cops from the local PD now start giving them funny looks.

They also haven't been in bed together ever since their harried tryst at the hospital.

On the surface, they look like best friends. At work, the two of them are partners - completely in sync at their tasks, though diametrically opposed with their respective way of thinking.

But when it's just the two of them, things happen.

Sometimes Steve has way too much to drink when Danny's around, and he ends up snuggling against him as if he's just a cat instead of a six foot tall space heater. And though Danny's burning from the contact, he lets Steve slump against him for a few more moments - long enough that he won't wake when he finally pulls away and slowly eases him back down against the sofa.

And with Danny, sometimes he just can't live with the inhospitable state of his apartment. So he heads up to Steve carrying only a blanket in tow and a few pillows and Steve doesn't even have to ask what he's there for when he arrives at the door - takes one look at Danny's state of undress, the circles in his eyes, smells the sour coffee in his breath and the burnt sugar on his shirt and he lets him in wordlessly.

Once, they kissed.

Steve pulling at his lips like he's guilty for not meeting him halfway. Danny pushing back because he won't have it happen since the man he loves is a tangled mess of wires and gears, someone who wouldn't know his up from his down even if Danny was willing to play the compass for him.

 _Not like this_ , he thinks. _Not while you're stupid and reckless and I'm aching like a broken bone._

But one night, Danny heads to Steve.

The man is passed out on the couch, pictures scattered over the table. Everything's been flipped down except a picture of four: a mother, a father, and two children.

Steve's breathing is jagged and cracked. He seems drunk on more than just beer. He's on his stomach and his head is turned towards space. Danny finds himself drawn to the mess and he crouches down on the carpet, pressing his back against the supple leather of furniture.

He marks the seconds in between Steve's breathing.

The dark haired man reaches out for him as if knowing he's there. Danny doesn't take his hand like he usually does.

Instead, he inches closer until Steve's fingers manage to graze at the side of his head. In sleep, Danny hears Steve's breath hitch.

He mumbles something in that same tearing voice. It sounds like a question - "Why?"

Danny presses his face closer to Steve until he can feel the softness of his side pillowing the back of his head. Danny sighs into the quiet of the McGarett household; wind whistles, cicadas chirp, and the sound of waves continue to crash outside to form an orchestra.

Danny closes his eyes and evens out his breath until mere seconds separate their exhales. He feels Steve's hand drop unto his chest like a half-embrace and Danny keeps it there without thinking.

Again, he hears Steve mumble the question "Why?"

He buries his face deeper into Steve's chest and sighs, breathing in the smell of fabric conditioner and the sweat on his skin. He laughs,

"Because you need me you, you goof." He tells him.

Steve shivers in the night. Danny squeezes his fingers.

He doesn't know if he's waiting for sleep to come, for dawn to mark the skies outside with light, or for something else entirely. All he knows is that right here and now, he wouldn't mind waiting.

Steve's arm tightens around him and it's all the license he needs to finally give in and pull himself close. His head rests at the border of Steve's shoulder and the hollow of his throat, close enough for him to feel the man's breaths tickling at the nape of his neck.

Danny knows he'll be the first thing Steve sees when he wakes up in the morning.

And that - if anything else - is the only reason why he stays.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story was first inspired by three songs I heard, and over the course of me writing it I also managed to find more to fuel my burning need to write this fic. Some songs I keep for myself, some songs stuck so much they managed to find themselves here, and some have even ended up shaping the way I wanted the story to turn up. The first three songs though that inspired me in writing are as follows:  
>  _Halsey (Stripped) // Colours: Where Steve is grey, Danny is blue, and they're both multiple shades of fucked up._  
>  _Illenium ft. Nina Sung // Only One: Here's a song to keeping each other alive._  
>  _EDEN // Circles: A beautiful insight into denial and how Steve must rationalize love._
> 
> And special mention to Oh Wonder's Shark for providing me with the title to the overall series.


End file.
